SynBioBeta Speaker
Tim Friede
Centivax
Dir. of Herpetology
Tim Friede is an autodidact herpetologist and venom expert. Almost twenty years ago, while collecting a home collection of venomous snakes, Tim began self-administering diluted venom as a means of establishing immunity in case he was ever bit accidentally. Over the course of nearly 20 years, he self-administered over 700 escalating doses of snake venom from the world’s deadliest snakes, culminating in the ability to be bitten by cobras, taipans, black mambas, rattlers and other venomous snakes and survive (he has now been bitten over 200 times). Realizing that he had achieved a level of hyperimmunity that was unusual for a human, he began reaching out to the therapeutic community asking to be researched in order to generate a universal antivenom. In 2017 he and Jacob Glanville were put in contact, and begun the collaboration that has ultimately given rise to the successful discovery of dozens of broad-spectrum anti-venom antibodies from his blood and the awarding of a National Institute of Health SBIR award to develop the polyclonal as the world’s first fully human broad-spectrum antivenom.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Tim
This Year
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Human Health
Programmable Immunity: Engineering the Universal Antivenom
For over a century, antivenoms have relied on serum extraction from animals — a process that’s costly, inconsistent, and limited to specific snake species. Today, advances in synthetic biology and antibody engineering are pointing toward a different future: a universal antivenom capable of neutralizing toxins across the world’s deadliest snakes. This session dives into the science and story behind this breakthrough — from the man who endured more than 200 bites to generate a unique immune response, to the researchers using those antibodies to design broad-spectrum, recombinant therapies. Together, they’re charting the path from survival experiment to programmable immunity.
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•
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Human Health
Programmable Immunity: Engineering the Universal Antivenom
For over a century, antivenoms have relied on serum extraction from animals — a process that’s costly, inconsistent, and limited to specific snake species. Today, advances in synthetic biology and antibody engineering are pointing toward a different future: a universal antivenom capable of neutralizing toxins across the world’s deadliest snakes. This session dives into the science and story behind this breakthrough — from the man who endured more than 200 bites to generate a unique immune response, to the researchers using those antibodies to design broad-spectrum, recombinant therapies. Together, they’re charting the path from survival experiment to programmable immunity.
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Session lineup still growing
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Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
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