Deadly snake may hold key in heart treatments

The green mamba is one of the world's deadliest snakes but research shows that it could be a lifesaver. The mamba's venom could be the key to saving people with heart failure.

A hormone that is found in the mamba's venom helps blood vessels widen, allowing the venom to flow to throughout a body more rapidly. As the venom flows blood pressure drops. The kidneys also are affected, in a very positive way reports Newser. The research team are keying into the positives that the venom has on kidney function. In most heart treatments the kidneys are left in peril, causing many heart patients to become kidney patients also. John Burnett, a heart failure expert at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota has been working with an experimental drug that is based partly on the venom of the mamba. The research is in the second phase of a clinical trial with 40 patients. It is currently enrolling patients to get a handle on how safe the treatment really is. More than 1 million people are admitted to hospitals in heart failure each year. Heart failure is marked by a build up of fluid in the heart and lungs leaving patients gasping for breath. Patients have the feeling that they are drowning in their own body. Current treatments use diuretics to rid the excess fluid from the body and nitroglycerin to help with the pressure on the heart. Though the treatments have some benefit they are little more than a band-aid with a poor long-term survival rate. People in acute heart failure also deal with problems with their kidneys because as the heart weakens it can't deliver proper blood flow to the kidney. When the kidneys are not receiving enough kidney to do their job salt they conserve salt and water. This causes even more fluid retention. The new drug made from with the mamba venom could help ease the problems with the kidney. In the initial study of 22 healthy patients the drug bolstered the function of the kidneys without lowering the blood pressure to a dangerous level. The 40-patient study should have results in mid 2010 reports the Wall Street Journal.