Tim Friede

Timothy Friede (born ) 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 was adopted when he was three months old, and spent his childhood living in a suburb around Milwaukee. He had a lifelong interest in snakes, and was first bitten by a harmless garter snake when he was five years old. In high school, he frequently hunted garter snakes in rural Wisconsin, and acquired a snake as a pet. Initially planning to join the United States military, he fractured his ankle at an Army boot camp when he was 19, and instead took up a job as a window-washer for high-rise buildings in Milwaukee. He later got a job working in construction.

Friede stopped injecting himself with venom and getting bit by snakes, receiving his last bite from a water cobra in November 2018. He became the director of herpetology at Glanville's California-based biotechnology company, Centivax. The development of a broad-spectrum antivenom would likely allow Centivax to control large portions of the antivenom industry, which is currently split between several dozen antivenoms which target specific species.