 Venoms have been used for medicines for many years, the first ever high blood pressure medication knows its discovery to snake venom. Here at VenomTate we're actually looking at other uses of venom to find out new mechanisms that could be therapeutically useful in the future. In this cabinet here behind glass we have the scorpions that are listed under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act and we were licensed to keep under that act. They include the wonderful common names like the Death Stalker and the African Fat Tail whose genus Androctonus actually translates to Man Killer and that's what we've got here in this group. Venom is an untapped resource, it's a complex mixture of different molecules and we don't know what's in there so there's this opportunity for a large number of compounds that we can screen. So I am in particular using Venoms to target a particular protein that's found on the surface of cancer cells and in breast cancer and this protein is important in the way the cancer behaves so it makes them very aggressive, makes them grow very quickly and so by blocking this particular protein we can actually stop these cancer cells from being able to grow. Pancreatic cancer is the 10th most common cancer in the UK but it accounts for the it's the fourth leading cause of cancer related death so although it's one of the rarer types of cancer it's really aggressive and currently there aren't very many effective treatments for pancreatic cancer. Venoms are made up of hundreds if not thousands of different components and they've evolved over millions of years for prey capture and for defense. Therefore with all of these different components which are unique to each different snake or venomous animal it provides a huge library of different compounds that we can screen and they may have serendipitously evolved to treat things like such as cancer or other medical conditions. So I've looked at a lot of snakes, I've looked at members, cobras and a large number of pit vipers but I've also done quite a lot of work looking at invertebrate venoms so I've been looking in tarantula, venoms, scorpions and also had a look at some centipede venoms. Now that we have compounds that are showing an effect against my protein we need to identify them so we can send those samples off for identification and get some data back and then these can be tested against other human cells to make sure that they are specifically affecting the cancer cells and not cells in general. So we're right at the beginning of the drug discovery process so once we've identified something that is effective in pancreatic cancer we need to check whether it's having an effect on other human cell types. Once we've assessed that it's selective for the cancer type and that it's not having detrimental effects in healthy cell types or any other cell types this could then proceed through to animal testing for example in mice and then eventually possibly into human clinical trials.