Snakes’ Feat May Inspire Heart Drugs, Lawrence K. Altman
As pythons digest their prey, their internal organs, including the heart, double in size. Heart expansion in pythons, as well as humans occurs through a process called hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is when an organ expands because existing cells enlarge, not because new cells are created. In humans, when this process occurs, it often causes high blood pressure and heart attacks. However, there is a second, more beneficial, type of hypertrophy that occurs in human hearts when conditioned athletes exercise. The enlargement of a python’s heart is similar to this second type of hypertrophy in human hearts. Injecting the blood from one python to another, a starving python is found to increase the size of the injected python’s heart. It is likely that three types of fatty acids, found in higher amount in snakes, are the cause of this phenomenon. To protect snakes the toxic effects of huge amount of lipids they have a specialized enzyme called SOD (superoxide dismutase).
This data is significant because it demonstrates how pythons’ blood could be used to create a new drug that will help prevent heart attacks and possibly other illnesses, like diabetes and high blood pressure. The beneficial type of hypertrophy that occurs in pythons’ hearts can decrease the risk of heart attacks, as well as other heart diseases. Although this was not expected, when a python’s blood was injected into rats and mice it caused their hearts enlarged, which means that these results could be found in humans, as well. However, there are risk factors because certain fatty acids and lipids found in snakes’ blood would damage the human heart if injected. Furthermore, structural differences between human and snake hearts could cause conflicts. One of the largest difference is that snake hearts have three chambers, while human hearts have four. There are also questions that still need to be answered in regards to the snakes’ ability to enlarge their organs after a meal. For example, scientists are still pondering “what causes the snakes organs to shrink to their fasting size,” which occurs a few days after eating their prey. Even more importantly, scientists need to find whether or not “injections of fatty acids will safely lead to sustained increase in organ size.” These issues and questions need to be addressed before new python blood based drugs are tested with humans. Although there are many problems that still need to be addressed, snake plasma does have potential for saving the lives of many who would have died of a heart disease.
This article was engaging and I learned a lot by reading it, but I found that it was vague in some areas and hard to follow. The author does not address how scientists plan to overcome the problems they face with using python blood as a medical treatment for humans. Moreover, this article would have been improved if the author gave background on how these python studies first started. Also, he should have gone into more detail about what experiments the scientists conducted to make their conclusions. This being said, however, the study discussed in this article was not only interesting, but extraordinarily relevant because in society today so many people are affected by potentially fatal heart problems that it medicine could help prevent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/health/python-digestion-study-holds-promise-for-human-heart-health.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=snake&st=cse