Definition of "antivenin" [an•ti•ve•nin]

• An antitoxin active against the venom of a snake, spider, or other venomous animal or insect. (noun)
• An animal serum containing antivenins. It is used in medicine to treat poisoning caused by animal or insect venom. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Ants endowed with a compulsion to chew through grass stems at a particular height, snakes engineered to create antivenin in a mammalian-derived sheath, beetles gifted with digestive enzymes that converted discarded plastics into chitin."
• "Those patients lucky enough to have survived the sting will receive a rapid IV administration of the antivenin. 4 Anaphylaxis can occur with administration of the sheep derived antivenin (available for primary use against the Chironex fleckeri)."
• "These adverse events often included anaphylactoid reactions (23 percent) and serum sickness (50 percent) .1 Although most adverse events did not result in mortality when treated with appropriate medication, such complications are problematic and fueled the development of a less immunogenic antivenin."