Healing with dragon blood may be no mere fantasy Dave Fleetham/Design Pics

On the Indonesian island of Komodo, monsters reminiscent of the age of the dinosaurs roam the jungles and beaches. “Ora buaya darat,” my guide Dullah whispers in the local tongue as he points in respectful awe at the 90-kilogram male lumbering towards me. “Komodo dragons.”

At up to 3 metres long, the Komodo is the world’s largest species of lizard, a true relic of a bygone era. I’ve been warned that the creatures are hard to locate – even though I’m on the island at the peak of dragon breeding season. But we’re lucky this morning.

In May, a tourist from Singapore travelling with Dullah wasn’t so fortunate. He went off on his own against the guide’s advice, and ended up getting a dragon bite on his leg that shattered bone. “Stay close,” Dullah warns, armed only with a long stick forked at the end like the dragon’s tongue.


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The dragon watches me with cold, dark eyes, tasting the air with a hissing yellow tongue that conceals rows of needle-sharp teeth and bacteria-strewn saliva. It’s hard to imagine these lizards as anything but a significant threat to human life – and they do occasionally kill people.

But in a strange twist, dragon blood is now emerging as a valuable resource that may be one of our best hopes for curing diseases we can’t seem to beat. If only that Singaporean were so lucky.

Rarely ill

Some of the first clues to the power of dragon blood came from a curious observation. Komodos generally eat carrion, which may be tainted with disease, but they rarely succumb to illness. Investigations showed that this is because the lizards’ blood is loaded with antimicrobial peptides, or AMPs – an all-purpose immune defence.

The hope is that those AMPs could be used as antibiotics to beat the growing number of resistant bacteria threatening hundreds of thousands of human lives around the world.

A world away from Komodo, Barney Bishop at Virginia’s George Mason University and his colleagues have spent the past five years studying dragon blood – along with blood extracted from alligators and other reptiles. And he’s confident that his Komodo research could lead to the development of a new generation of powerful antibiotics.

“Elective surgery, chemotherapy, even childbirth,” says Bishop, listing possible situations in which drugs derived from dragon blood could help.

To bring those possibilities closer to reality, Bishop and a handful of other researchers analyse blood samples to pinpoint which dragon peptides could have drug potential. So far, they have identified nearly 50 such AMPs.

In February, the World Health Organization published its first-ever list of “priority pathogens” – 12 types of bacteria that pose a real threat to human health because of their antibiotic resistance. Two of them – Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus – may be treatable with dragon blood peptides, says Bishop.

Now Bishop and his colleagues are busy identifying which peptides may be best suited for medicinal use, the first step in getting them to market.

“The less the peptides have to be altered, the easier it could be to get them to market, and FDA-approved and saving lives,” he says.

Government commissions in the US and the UK have reported that if we don’t find new ways to treat infections that are resistant to antibiotics, we could face a global death rate from bacteria of 10 million a year by 2050 – a higher toll, for example, than from cancer or diabetes. The creation of new drugs could help avoid that bleak future.

Limited numbers

Barney uses captured Komodos for his research, and admits that he needs more samples. But they’re hard to get. “Expensive,” he adds.

And they’re endangered, of course. Dullah tells me there are only about 1500 dragons on the island of Komodo – although there are also populations on Flores, Rinca, Gili Motang and Padar. This might go some way to explaining why they are difficult to find, and why we are so fortunate to have encountered our large male.

The species was granted protected status in the 1970s, after years of being hunted. It rebounded in the 1990s, but the population has recently begun to plateau. Now the wild giants seem to be having trouble reproducing and face a slew of pressures: climate change, tourist harassment and habitat encroachment all threaten their future.

We can only hope that conservation efforts help to keep the dragons in existence, given that there are few in captivity. Because if they die out, so could a very promising avenue of research into human health.