Mémoire
| Résumé : | The king cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) is a medically important snake accounting for significant mortality and morbidity in Asia, mainly resulting from its notorious popularity and consequent usage in snake performances. Despite the existence of specific treatment, its wide geographic distribution is associated with venom variation, impacting both venom lethality and antivenom effectiveness. In this review, we first discuss the current understanding of king cobra venom on a medical perspective from reported envenomation cases, as well as antivenom availability and effectiveness. We further comment on king cobra proteomic and functional analysis retrieved from scientific literature. Although venoms from multiple South-Asian and South-East Asian regions were profiled, we denoted an important lack of information regarding the geographical origin of intraspecific variation, with limited reliability in cross-study comparison due to material and methodological differences. More importantly, if a novel production method was recently proposed to answer the discrepancy of antivenom effectiveness associated with intraspecific venom variation, its application for king cobra remains far reached. Notably, the extreme scarcity of functional analysis appears as the main limiting factor for the development of toxin-specific antivenom with pan regional effectiveness, or to a lesser extent, for the improvement of current antivenom production. Thus, we emphasize the need for more research on the intraspecific venom variation of king cobra through a combination of proteomic, toxicovenomics and antivenomics approaches to decipher the varying toxin families and subtypes responsible for major symptoms of envenomation. |
