Pythons have several unusual traits that scientists are studying for possible clues to treating human diseases. Ari Daniel for NPR hide title toggle title Ari Daniel for NPR For new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines, Follow NPR’s Short Wave podcast. When Skip Maas first adopted Agrapina, a spotted ball python, she
Pythons have several unusual traits that scientists are studying for possible clues to treating human diseases.
Ari Daniel for NPR
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Ari Daniel for NPR
For new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines, Follow NPR’s Short Wave podcast.
When Skip Maas first adopted Agrapina, a spotted ball python, she hadn’t eaten in 14 months.
But as he soon observed, she was still a taut, spring-loaded coil of muscle. When presented with a rat, he quickly attacked it, hugged it, and then gorged himself with food.
And then its body performed another feat that pythons are known for: It dramatically sped up its metabolism to deal with the sudden influx of protein and fat, Maas says, “to help break down that food and extract all of its nutrients.”
Most people prefer to stay away from pythons, and for good reason. A quick blow followed by relentless constriction can be lethal. But Maas, a molecular biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and his colleagues maintain that these snakes may hold secrets that could help people live longer and better.
In addition to being able to fast for weeks or months and still maintain muscle tone, they can grow and shrink their heart and other organs during feasts and famines with seemingly no problems.
Molecular biologist Skip Maas holds his pet ball python Agrapina, along with fellow python researchers Jack Gugel (left), Tommy Martin (right), and Yuxiao Tan (far right), in Boulder, Colorado.
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“It makes a lot of sense that pythons, because they live in such extreme environments, would have secrets that would apply to humans,” says Leslie Leinwand, a geneticist who, two decades ago, first came up with the idea of translating pythons’ unique biology into medical treatments.
She is currently the executive scientific director of the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder. And his lab conducts an ongoing research project studying reptiles and regularly publishes findings that they hope could lead to medical advances.
The pythons “are very adapted to their lifestyle,” says Maas, who recently completed his Ph.D. in Leinwand’s laboratory. “I think it’s a great avenue to look at something that evolution has already discovered for inspiration.”
The spectacular internal renovation of a python
A particularly extreme characteristic of the python is its metabolism: the speed at which it can transform food into usable energy.
“Pythons speed up their metabolism 10 to 40 times after a feeding, depending on the size of the meal,” says Tommy Martin, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and former researcher in Leinwand’s lab.
Leslie Leinwand is a geneticist who, two decades ago, first came up with the idea of translating the unique biology of pythons into medical treatments.
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That’s “the equivalent of a Kentucky Derby racehorse at rest, compared to when it runs around the track,” says Jack Gugel, a molecular biologist at CU Boulder and a former student of Leinwand. But pythons, he notes, can maintain “that high metabolic state for days while they digest food.”
To handle such a high metabolism, the python’s body undergoes a dramatic renovation. “Your organs will actually grow,” says Gugel. That includes the snake’s heart, so it can pump more blood and oxygen to digest the food.
Human hearts can also increase in size, over the course of years. When that growth is due to high blood pressure or a heart attack, the heart remains enlarged and stiffens, with potentially fatal consequences.
“Some people, no matter what they do, even if they have a perfect diet and exercise every day, will still have heart disease,” Gugel adds.
In pythons, however, about a month after consuming a meal, their heart returns to its previous size.
“And we were really interested in finding out: What are the signals that tell this heart to grow?” Gugel says. “And also, what are the signals that tell the heart to return to its normal size?”
Answering these questions could offer ideas on how to stop or even reverse problematic heart growth in people.
Yuxiao Tan, a molecular biologist at CU Boulder, is researching python heart cells. Here he poses with a toy python in the laboratory.
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Yuxiao Tan, a molecular biologist at CU Boulder who was supervised by Leinwand, has revealed another important insight in a soon-to-be-published study. “Not only can your heart grow,” he says, “but your heart muscle cells also increase in number after eating.”
It’s different in humans. “When people have a heart attack,” Tan explains, “they end up with a scar over their heart because heart muscle cells can’t proliferate and repair the scar.”
Research in Leinwand’s lab is still underway, but it’s possible that pythons could hold clues about how we might remodel human hearts to improve our own heart health at different stages of life.
Of muscles and molecules
Another line of research these researchers are pursuing is related to the python’s apparent ability to resist muscle atrophy.
Take Agrapina, Maas’s pet python, for example. Even after months of not eating and barely moving, when she caught the rat he offered her, “she was strong enough to contract it completely. She was completely capable,” he says. “I had lost very little muscle tone despite all that time fasting.”
“I don’t know of any other creature that can perform this type of fast without losing muscle function,” Leinwand says. She believes this ability could one day lead to treatments for people who suffer from muscle atrophy as they age.
And Leinwand says the snake’s digestive processes also have something to teach us, pointing to the countless small molecules produced when the animal breaks down a meal. “I think this could be what we call a gold mine.”
In fact, Leinwand co-authored a paper published this spring in the journal nature metabolismwith collaborators from various institutions, describing a molecule that runs through the blood of Burmese and ball pythons and that arises a thousand times after feeding.
“If I were a betting man,” Leinwand says, “I’d bet that something that changes a thousand times is probably doing something important.”
The study confirmed his suspicion. Gugel says the molecule, called pTOS, appears to act as an appetite suppressant by attacking the hypothalamus in the brain.
Jack Gugel stands with a pet python around his neck in front of the Flatirons, the iconic sandstone slabs that help make Boulder a climber’s paradise. Gugel has been researching how pythons can rapidly increase the size of their hearts.
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“When we give this molecule to obese mice, they eat less and lose weight,” he says.
Jasmin Camacho, an evolutionary biologist at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, applauds work with pythons as another way to look in unexpected places for possible drugs and cures. “By getting to this extreme animal, that molecule was expressed at a higher level in a way that just stood out,” he says.
Camacho, who was not involved in the python research, studies bats and believes they could hold secrets to combating diabetes, since they can consume large amounts of nectar without any apparent health problems.
“Evolution has been conducting natural experiments for hundreds of millions of years,” he says. “So by studying these adaptations, we started to think about other ways our bodies can function.”
Animal-inspired renaissance
GLP-1 weight loss drugs, such as Ozempic, arose from research into the venomous Gila monster lizard. Gugel expects a similar trajectory for the new molecule discovered by the Python studies.
“I think there is a lot of potential in the market for a drug that can specifically inhibit appetite in the brain to help people lose weight,” he says.
To that end, Gugel, Leinwand, Martin and Jonathan Long of Stanford University have formed a company called Arkana Therapeutics to develop this and other discoveries into new drugs and treatments. They hope to look beyond pythons to other overlooked species, Martin says.
Ashley Zehnder is the CEO of Fauna Bio, a company pursuing disease resistance therapies among mammals equipped with unique adaptations. She says the approach Leinwand’s team at CU Boulder is taking could broaden the palette of drug discovery.
“You can find these really potent bioactive molecules in these extreme species,” he says, “because they were evolutionarily perfected and we can use them for medicines.”
Naturally, this approach poses challenges, Zehnder says, including learning how to care for animals in the lab and having to figure out their complex inner workings from scratch.
But the reward, Zehnder argues, could be potential cures for our afflictions drawn from the great tree of life. “I think we can learn a lot if we put ourselves back on that evolutionary tree and ask ourselves, ‘What can we learn from these other animals?'” he says.
“And I think what it will do at the end of the day is make us really appreciate the value of that diversity.”
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