{"id":304353,"date":"2017-03-24T08:00:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T08:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=304353"},"modified":"2017-03-24T08:00:47","modified_gmt":"2017-03-24T08:00:47","slug":"spider-venom-may-offer-stroke-therapy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2017\/03\/spider-venom-may-offer-stroke-therapy\/","title":{"rendered":"Spider venom may offer stroke therapy"},"content":{"rendered":"
A protein in spider venom may help protect the brain from injury after a stroke, according to research.<\/p>\n
Scientists found a single dose of the protein Hi1a worked on lab rats.<\/p>\n
They said it showed “great promise as a future stroke treatment” but had not yet been tested in human trials.<\/p>\n
The Stroke Association said the research was at its early stages but it would “welcome any treatment that has the potential to reduce the damage caused by stroke”.<\/p>\n
The researchers, from the University of Queensland and Monash University, travelled to Fraser Island in Australia to hunt for and capture three potentially deadly Australian funnel web spiders.<\/p>\n
“We regularly collect spiders from Fraser Island off the south coast of Queensland,” explained lead researcher Prof Glenn King.<\/p>\n
“The reason for this is that funnel-web spiders dig burrows that can be as deep as 20-30 cm. Thus, digging them up from hard clay soils is very difficult. Fraser Island is a sand island which makes it easy for us to extract the spiders from their burrows.”<\/p>\n
The team then took the spiders back to their laboratory “for milking”.<\/p>\n
This involved coaxing the spider to release its venom, which could then be sucked up using pipettes.<\/p>\n
Next the scientists dissected the venom gland of the spiders and honed in on a protein in the venom to recreate a version of it in their lab.<\/p>\n
They then injected this Hi1a into the lab rats.<\/p>\n