Tim Friede

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Timothy Friede (born c. 1968) is an American mechanic and snake collector who intentionally exposed himself to various forms of snake venom in order to acquire immunity. A lifelong enthusiast of snakes, he began injecting himself with snake venom in 2000 after taking a venom extraction class. After being bitten by two cobras on the same night in 2001 and being left comatose for four days, he resolved to develop an advanced immunity to a variety of snakebites, amassing a collection of over sixty snakes and teaching himself immunology. He injected himself with snake venom over 800 times, and was bitten around 200. After receiving perennial media attention over the 2000s and 2010s, he was contacted by immunologist and biotechnology researcher Jacob Glanville, who saw his acquired resistance as crucial to the development of a broad-spectrum snake antivenom. In a 2025 study published in Cell, two of these antibodies, combined with the anti-inflammatory agent varespladib, proved effective in countering thirteen out of nineteen venoms in a sample of nineteen snake venoms, and was partially effective against the remaining six. He works as the director of herpetology at Glanville's biotechnology company, Centivax.