Behind Dr. Mandë Holford’s glowing smile and multiple STEM degrees lies a deep secret.

Efficient killers are her life’s work.

And those killers have the potential to change yours.

Well, they aren’t ALL killers…

The smallest cone snails carry a venom that’s no worse than a bee sting. But the largest of them—still only around 9 inches—pack enough power to kill humans in minutes.

Instead, Dr. Mandë is harnessing that power to kill pain and even cancer.

Like so many creatures of the deep, cone snails are beautiful but deadly. Every single one of the 3,200+ known species is carnivorous and venomous. Their decorative shells blend into the ocean floor, while a proboscis much like an elephant’s, but smaller, searches the water for prey. Once they’ve found a meal, cone snails deploy a small barb that envenomates with precision, incapacitating victims almost immediately.

Cone snail venom works so efficiently because each species’ venom has thousands of individual components that each target different life functions. One may paralyze, while another targets respiration, and another blinds, rendering prey completely helpless. The only time a cone snail misses a meal is if it misses altogether.

So what does ANY of that have to do with medicine?

Imagine morphine—and every pain-killing opioid—becoming obsolete. Because cone snail toxins can directly target the nervous system, they can inhibit pain receptors with a medicine created by Mother Nature, instead of pharmaceutical companies.

Imagine stopping cancer’s growth in its tracks with simple, naturally derived injections instead of poisonous radiation treatments.

And imagine all of that from the hands of a little girl who loved the museum. At New York’s American Museum of Natural History, whole worlds unfolded before young Mandë Holford.

But growing up always forces us to choose one.

Still, a BS in mathematics and chemistry and PhD. in Synthetic Protein Chemistry didn’t satisfy Dr. Mandë’s curiosity. But one day, the opportunity to study with a scientist who combined physics, chemistry and biology in his work came along, and reintroduced Dr. Mandë to science through the lens of a kaleidoscope instead of a microscope.

“This is what I would like to do,” she thought. “I’d like to bridge the medical training that I received at Rockefeller with the natural history and the wonder and excitement of studying what’s here in biodiversity. And figure out how to make science—how to do the kind of work that is both beneficial to society, but also exploring the wonder that’s here on our planet.”

And today, that is precisely what she does. Dr. Mandë’s work with cone snails and other venomous mollusks could revolutionize medicine.

And that’s not just theoretically speaking. Prialt is an FDA-approved drug 1,000 times as potent as morphine with NONE of its chemical dependency. It’s also a direct derivative of cone snail venom. Dr. Mandë didn’t invent it, but she is working to perfect it. Right now, Prialt can only be administered through painful spinal taps. Dr. Mandë hopes to make it as simple as a booster shot.

But Prialt only utilizes one cone snail venom component, and there are thousands, if not millions, more to unlock for use in medicine. Each venom’s individual components—peptides—are tested to explore their effect on a variety of human cells. One such test revealed a peptide that specifically targeted liver cancer cells and inhibited their growth, a groundbreaking find. “What’s amazing about the peptides that we’re finding in the snail venom is not only are they giving us new drugs, but they’re also giving us new pathways for treating old problems,” says Holford.

All of these experiments and discoveries occur in their own little world bearing Dr. Mandë’s name: the Holford Lab at Hunter College at CUNY. But even outside of her lab, people take notice of Dr. Mandë. On a snail collecting trip to Papua New Guinea, she realized that all of the locals stared at her, a feeling familiar to many Black woman traveling abroad. “And you know, in your subconscious, you’re like, ‘What is it? Is it my hair? Do I have something in my teeth? What’s going on?’” But this time was different. This time, the locals stared because the chief scientist of a research team looked like them.

“And it was something I wasn’t prepared for, because I didn’t view myself as a role model,” Holford says. “And I wasn’t trying to be anybody’s role model. You’re just trying to do your thing… but it was also empowering.”

With all that empowerment, Dr. Mandë hopes to bring other people who look like her into the fold. “I like to say that science is one of the cheapest careers. It’s like soccer—all you need is a ball,” she jokes. “In science, all you need is a brain, and all of us are born that way.”

And if you still aren’t convinced, consider the cone snail. It may be small. It may blend into its surroundings. But even without a backbone, this little creature wields the power of life and death… a power that only a few humans like Dr. Mandë Holford ever have the privilege to behold.

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