Snakebite envenoming remains one of the world's most neglected tropical diseases, and solving it will require ideas from inside and outside the health sector. But what makes an innovation truly valuable in real-world snakebite care?

We spoke with Darryl Wood, Emergency Medicine physician at Queens Hospital in London and judge for the Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize, about the biggest opportunities for innovation, what makes a strong application, and why collaboration, real-world insight and evidence-based solutions will be key to transforming snakebite care over the coming decade.

It can feel intimidating if you're not a snakebite expert, but it really shouldn't be. You don't have to become an expert overnight.

The most important thing is collaboration. The strongest projects bring together people with different areas of expertise and create opportunities to learn from one another. If you have an idea that could improve snakebite care, don't be afraid to take it to clinicians or researchers who work in the field. Working together will help strengthen both your idea and its potential impact.

It's also important to engage with the people who experience snakebite care first-hand. That includes not only patients and communities affected by snakebite, but also the healthcare workers who diagnose, treat and support them. Their experiences can provide invaluable insights into where the biggest challenges lie and where innovation could make the greatest difference.

You don't need to be a snakebite specialist to make a meaningful contribution, you just need to work collaboratively with those who are.

Beyond public health and prevention measures, which remain absolutely essential, I believe one of the greatest opportunities for innovation is reducing diagnostic uncertainty and helping patients receive treatment faster.

In many regions with a high burden of snakebite envenoming, clinicians are faced with bites from multiple snake species that can produce very different symptoms. That makes it difficult to quickly diagnose envenoming, assess its severity and decide on the most appropriate treatment. Every delay can have serious consequences for patients.

The innovations that could make the biggest difference are those that reduce the time between a snakebite and effective treatment. That might mean improving the way healthcare workers identify envenoming, better tools for assessing severity, or technologies that support faster clinical decision-making.

While researchers have proposed several clinical scoring systems to help assess patients, these have yet to be widely adopted, particularly in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, where the burden of snakebite is greatest. There are also promising diagnostic approaches, for example, technologies that assess how blood clotting is affected in haemotoxic envenoming, but many of these innovations remain underexplored or have not yet been translated into routine clinical practice.

For entrants, I would encourage thinking about how your solution could help clinicians make faster, more confident decisions. Reducing the time to treatment has enormous potential to improve outcomes for people affected by snakebite.

The strongest solutions are those that are designed with a deep understanding of the real-world clinical environment.

Emergency departments in many low- and middle-income countries are often busy, resource-constrained, and unpredictable. If you're developing a new technology, conducting research or designing a clinical study, you need to ask whether it will actually work in that setting.

Researchers need to think carefully about issues such as patient consent, confidentiality and data collection in environments where staff are already under significant pressure. Even decisions about how and when patients are recruited into a study can affect whether the research is practical and whether its findings will be robust.

If you're unfamiliar with these settings, I'd strongly encourage working with people who are. A multidisciplinary team can provide invaluable insight into how a solution should be designed to fit the realities of clinical care.

Introducing new innovations into emergency care is never easy. Emergency departments are challenging environments, whether in low- and middle-income countries or elsewhere, and new techniques will always encounter some resistance.

The key is that any new innovation or technique must first be proven to work. That's a fundamental part of the process. Beyond that, it also needs to be sustainable and capable of becoming part of routine clinical practice. Ultimately, the goal is to develop innovations that deliver long-term benefits for patients and healthcare systems, rather than simply supporting a single research project.

I think this prize has a much broader reach. It has the potential to attract people from a much wider range of backgrounds and areas of expertise. You don't have to be a clinician or a traditional snakebite researcher; you might be a sociologist or come from a completely different field.

Traditional research grants are often quite structured. They start with a specific research question and follow well-established methodologies. This prize is different because it creates space for innovative ideas that might challenge the way we currently think about snakebite.

If you have an idea that could make a real difference, this prize provides an opportunity to explore it, even if it doesn't fit within the boundaries of a traditional research grant. That innovation might change how we diagnose and treat snakebite, but it could also improve public health, strengthen health systems or transform the way care is delivered.

I hope this prize generates a wide range of innovative ideas that help move snakebite care towards more evidence-based and measurable models of care.

For many years, we've relied heavily on the experience of a relatively small number of clinicians with expertise in snakebite management. When they're available, we rely on their expertise. When they're not, clinicians do their best, but this can lead to variation in how snakebite is managed.

One of the biggest opportunities is to reduce that variability. In places like South Africa, where I worked, different clinicians could manage very similar snakebite cases in different ways. We need stronger evidence to guide those decisions so that care becomes more consistent and patients receive the best possible treatment regardless of where they're treated.

I'd like to see more objective, evidence-based approaches to snakebite management that lead to more consistent care and better outcomes for patients.

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Throughout the conversation, one message comes through consistently: the most impactful innovations begin with understanding the realities of snakebite care. Whether reducing diagnostic uncertainty, designing solutions that work in real-world clinical settings, or generating evidence that can improve patient outcomes, Dr. Wood emphasises that successful innovation must be grounded in the environments where it will be used.

For teams new to the field, his advice is equally clear: collaborate across disciplines, seek guidance from clinicians and other experts, and involve the people who experience snakebite care firsthand, including both patients and frontline healthcare workers. By combining diverse expertise with real-world insight, innovators have the greatest opportunity to develop solutions that can make a lasting difference.

If you have an idea that could make a lasting difference to snakebite care, we encourage you to turn that idea into a solution. Build on real-world understanding, collaborate across disciplines, and apply to the Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize before 16 September 2026.