Each year, snake bites kill upwards of 100,000 people and permanently disable hundreds of thousands more, according to estimates from the World Health Organization. Promising new science, enabled by state-of-the-art technology, could help quell the threat.

The AI-designed proteins could form the basis of a new generation of therapies for snakebites — which kill an estimated 100,000 people each year and are still treated much as they were a century ago.

It has been a few years since AI began successfully tackling the challenge of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins, complex molecules that are essential for all life. Next-generation tools are now available,