Table 1.
List of clinical trials investigating snake antivenom published in clinical trials registries.
Fig 1.
Flow diagram of the selection process used in this study.
The search was conducted on 15 September 2014. Merging the search results gave a total of 41 clinical trials investigating the efficacy or safety of snake antivenoms, of which four were active. A total of 36 different antivenoms were investigated (see Table 2). Based on the trial design (Phase I to IV), ten products were considered still “under development,” although development appears to have stalled for most of them. Our search strategy appears robust; a report conducted in 2010 identified a total of 43 randomized controlled trials on snakebite envenoming, 28 of which investigated antivenom properties [11]. We retrieved all except two of these trials [12,51]; the discrepancy could be due to differences in the criteria used to define clinical trials.
Table 2.
List of antivenoms investigated in clinical trials published in peer-reviewed journals or on public registries.
Table 3.
Available snake antivenom products in sub-Saharan Africa, as of September 2014.