Word: venoms
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...does one extract venom from a tiny, delicate and perhaps deadly spider? In a word: carefully. Kristensen and his wife Anita start by tranquilizing the specimen with a gentle breeze of carbon-dioxide gas from a cylinder behind the milking desk. Once the spider is groggy, the milker, peering through a low-power stereoscopic microscope, gently picks it up with metal tweezers that are connected to an electrical supply. When a mild shock is administered through the tweezers, the spider promptly spews up pretty much everything liquid inside it--including digestive enzymes. That was a problem early on, until Chuck...
...often takes hundreds of spiders and the better part of a day to harvest enough venom--a few drops--to fill an order. For their trouble, Chuck and Anita each week send out up to three or four packages of frozen or freeze-dried venom, usually to pharmaceutical and chemical companies. It's a hard way to make a living, even when it is supplemented by income from odd jobs like the technical-adviser gig Chuck landed for the 1990 film Arachnophobia. So for most of the past decade, Chuck handed scaled-back day-to-day operations of Spider Pharm...
This is the livestock of Spider Pharm, a mom-and-pop operation that Kristensen began as a hobby in 1980 and that has since grown into the most active purveyor of spider venom in the world...
...Spider venom is a gold mine of pharmacological tools," explains Michael Adams, a venom-using neuroscientist at the University of California at Riverside. The active compounds in venom bind with extreme selectivity to molecules on the surfaces of living cells, a property that can be of invaluable use to researchers developing new medicines with better specificity (and thus fewer side effects) or just trying to understand, at the molecular level, the inner workings of living cells...
...venom purchased from Kristensen in the 1980s, for example, helped neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas of New York University School of Medicine discover a new calcium channel involved in the communication between certain neurons, shedding new light on how the mind works. Another toxin extracted from Spider Pharm venom in 1995 by Kenton Swartz at the National Institutes of Health (named hanatoxin after Swartz's daughter) is being used to probe the function of proteins that are located on cellular membranes and have been implicated in diseases ranging from diabetes to epilepsy...