Leslie Boyer: Antivenom for Scorpion Stings

After a scorpion stings your bare foot (Ouch!), venom quickly takes.

And no one in the world of bioscience can feel your pain like Leslie Boyer.
'Your nerves fire away. Your muscles contract, and you jerk and twitch and dance around,' says Boyer, who is recognized as the top expert on clinical research on the subject.

The good news is that Arizona's hospitals have a supply of antivenom for the deadly bark scorpion, thanks to a chance event and a collaboration with a producer in Mexico. It's a story that Boyer, who grew up here feeding moths to Tucson's spiders long before she got a Harvard medical degree and joined The University of Arizona (UA) faculty, tells with relish.

In 1999, she was in a laboratory in Cuernavaca, invited by National Geographic to help make a TV program on scorpions. As a cameraman looked on in horror, a Mexican professor demonstrated what a scorpion can do, injecting a mouse with Arizona venom. The mouse turned blue, shook, foamed, and looked dead, knocking the TV cameraman for a loop. 'Our viewers like little creatures like this,' he said rushing out in horror. The professor, sensing a need to alter the script, injected a Mexican antidote.

'Within minutes,' says Boyer, 'the mouse was pink again, grooming itself, back from the dead, really.'

She knew she wanted that drug to help Arizona's children, who are most vulnerable to the bark scorpion. Boyer, who is founding director of the UA's VIPER Institute, for Venom Immunochemistry, Pharmacology, and Emergency Response; medical director of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center; an associate professor of clinical pediatrics in the College of Medicine and a BIO5 member, by chance met that day, the president of the company that makes the drug, Bioclon.

'I told him I wanted to inject it into children in Arizona, and he offered to help.'

Eight years later, the drug is used widely in Arizona, reaching about 250 children a year. She is working on clinical trials on the path to FDA product licensure.

Of the 15,000 people stung by scorpions each year in the United States, only those 250 or so children need antivenom.

By contrast, Mexico developed the antivenom that Boyer is supporting in response to the 250,000 scorpion stings there, where dangerous scorpions are common.

'It is a beautiful collaboration with Mexico,' Boyer says, 'our skills in clinical trials and their biotechnology.' She works with the manufacturer in Mexico City, the research institute in Cuernavaca and hospitals throughout Mexico.

Boyer's experience with the Mexican antivenom drug is just one of her efforts to further knowledge of poison and venom around the world.

A few years ago, she was enlisted in efforts to help Almaty, Kazakhstan, a sister city of Tucson, and ended up helping to found Kazakhstan's first poison center system. It now has a toll-free hotline, the first former Soviet state to open one.

In Arizona, Boyer works with hospitals statewide and with the San Carlos Apaches, Tohono O'odham and Hopi tribes on poison control problems.

VIPER's mission is applied phylogenetics, or the application of the genealogy of venomous creatures to practical problems like creating diagnostic tools and treatment options.

"There is so much to learn from venomous creatures," she says. "I hope to help find compatibilities among medicine, biology and phylogenetics that will lead to new medicines. That's going to be a research frontier for many years to come."

Accomplishments

Leslie Boyer is recognized as the leading authority on clinical study of scorpion stings, and for her studies of the interaction of snake venom, antivenom and the coagulation of blood.

Boyer is medical director of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center in the College of Pharmacy and founding director of the VIPER Institute in the College of Medicine at the UA. She studied chemistry at the UA, then received her medical doctorate from Harvard and served a pediatric residency at Children's Hospital in Boston. She became chief resident in pediatrics at the UA Health Sciences Center in 1988.

In 1991, she completed a fellowship in Clinical Toxicology at the UA.

She joined the UA pediatric faculty in 1991 and has additional appointments in pharmacology and pathology in the College of Medicine and an administrative appointment in Pharmacy.

She conducts clinical studies of envenomation and is carrying out Phase II and III clinical trials of antivenoms for the treatment of scorpion stings and snake bites.

Her work has been presented on The Discovery Channel, PBS, BBC, National Geographic and National Public Radio.

Boyer's faculty page in the College of Pharmacy http://www.pharmacy.arizona.edu/person.php?id=255

Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center video showing desert creatures with painful stings
http://www.pharmacy.arizona.edu/outreach/poison/venom.php

The Arizona Sonora Desert Museum offers details on the bark scorpion
http://www.desertmuseum.org/books/nhsd_scorpions_new.php

The Instituto de Biotecnologica UNAM is a partner in Boyer's research
http://www.ibt.unam.mx/