As a kid, Mouad Mkamel played with pet snakes, vipers and scorpions. As a Ph.D. student at University King Hassan II of Casablanca, Mkamel is now breeding scorpions and milking their venom using a robot he designed.
At $7,000 to $8,000 per gram, scorpion venom is one of the most expensive liquids in the world. Mkamel believes scorpion venom has the potential to “create a new generation of medicine,” estimating that there are about five million unstudied compounds in venoms that may be useful for drug development. Mkamel says the “cocktail of bioactive compounds” in venoms may be useful to fight cancer, malaria, depression or to develop new painkillers.
For his study, Mkamel bred 1,300 scorpions of four species: A. mauritanicus, B. Occitanus, H. Franzwerneri, and S. Maurus. Then, he designed a system with different modes that optimize venom extraction for each species.
Supply, says Mkamel, is often a limiting ...
