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Professor Nick Casewell

 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8035-4719

Personal profile

Biography

Nicholas Casewell is a toxinologist and Director of the Centre for Snakebite Research and Interventions at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM). He undertook his PhD at Bangor University, where he studied the composition, evolution and immunology of snake venoms. Post-PhD Nicholas worked for the UK antivenom manufacturing company MicroPharm Limited, before winning a Natural Environment Research Council fellowship to investigate the evolution and composition of animal venoms. He joined LSTM in 2014 and was later awarded a Sir Henry Dale Research Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society to develop new treatments for tropical snakebite. In 2019, Nicholas was appointed Chair in Tropical Disease Biology by LSTM, and in 2023-2024 acted as the interim Head of Department for the Tropical Disease Biology Department.
Nicholas serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals (Toxins, Toxicon and PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases) is a committee member of the UK Health Security Agency Expert Group on Antivenoms and previously served on the Executive Committee of the International Society on Toxinology. He actively contributes to snakebite advocacy activities, including helping to establish International Snakebite Awareness Day, developing museum exhibits (Liverpool World Museum, London Natural History Museum), and co-organising the international public meeting Snakebite: From Science to Society. He was a finalist of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution’s Walter Fitch Award in 2011, awarded the Toxins Young Investigator Award in 2019, and was named as an honouree (finalist) in the life sciences category of the 2025 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom.

Research interests

Nicholas’s research focus is to understand the mechanisms by which variation in venom (toxin) composition is generated and how this variation can be circumvented during the development of new therapeutics for snakebite. This includes investigating how snake venom variation impacts upon the efficacy of treatment, characterising the functional activity of venoms and their constitutive toxins, testing the immunological cross-reactivity, safety, stability and efficacy of snakebite antivenoms, rational discovery and preclinical testing of new therapeutic modalities for treating snakebite, discovery and development of small molecule toxin inhibitors and inhibitor combinations as new snakebite therapies, and evaluation of the safety and efficacy of new snakebite therapeutics via clinical trials.

Highlights have included the publication of the first snake genomes, the development and validation of venom gland organoids, assessments of antivenom efficacy informing policy decisions, and the development of new therapeutic modalities for inhibiting venom toxins, including monoclonal antibodies, nanobodies, small molecule drugs and drug combinations. These studies have led to inventorship on multiple patent applications, and the progression of a repurposed drug from preclinical development, through Phase I and into a Phase IIa clinical trial. His research has been funded from diverse sources, resulting in a total grant income of >£30 million. Nicholas has published more than 150 scientific papers in the toxinology field, most of which focus on snake venoms and snakebite therapeutics, and these include papers that featured on the covers of prestigious journals, such as Science, Nature, Science Translational Medicine and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

Teaching

Nicholas teaches on various LSTM-led Masters courses and professional accreditations, mostly in the context of venom biology and snakebite, and co-leads the One Health MSc module Key Topics in Snakebite. He also regularly supports PhD students on the topics of venom biology and snakebite.

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