seapug

From AAP:
The snails have a cocktail of powerful agents in their venom, which they use to immobilise their prey, explains Professor David Adams who is director of the Health Innovations Research Institute at Melbourne's RMIT.

Research is under way to isolate those agents - peptides - which, he said, could be used safely to treat pain in humans as a less problematic alternative to morphine.

"In some of the old medical reports where people have been stung by these cone snails, they don't feel pain, most of them die because of respiratory paralysis," Prof Adams told AAP.

"In a way nature has done a lot of the work, these peptides are designed to target receptors in pain pathways.

"Our job is just to find them and put them to use."

read the rest here:
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1...in-relief-drug