Inter-individual variability in equine antibody responses to African snake venoms follows heavy-tailed distributions with implications for antivenom manufacturing

Variability within the antibody response of horses used for snake antivenom manufacture is properly acknowledged, but its statistical construction and implications for industrial productiveness stay poorly characterised. On this research, we quantified antivenom antibody titers by ELISA in a cohort of 14 horses immunized with venoms from the clinically most necessary snakes in sub-Saharan Africa. To combine antibody ranges with plasma availability, we calculated the Cumulative Plasma Productiveness (CPP) by changing particular person plasma volumes into titer-corrected equivalents and sequentially pooling these volumes in line with their corrected contribution. Distributional evaluation revealed right-skewed, heavy-tailed patterns higher approximated by a log-normal mannequin than by a strict Pareto (power-law) kind, with roughly 20–30% of horses accounting for almost half of whole cohort productiveness. Excluding plasma from the lowest-productivity horses didn’t considerably enhance the venom-neutralizing efficiency of the plasma pool within the mouse mannequin however considerably lowered the entire plasma quantity. Whereas the precise quantitative contributions might range throughout cohorts, the qualitative conclusions are more likely to be generalizable beneath related experimental circumstances.