Snake venoms are well known and potential areas of research for finding new therapeutic drugs or leads for drug design. Venoms are studied for their actions on hemostatic mechanism, neuronal pathways and also on various cancer cells. Toxins from snake venoms give scope to identify new molecules with therapeutic action or help to understand different cellular mechanisms. Russell’s viper is one of the aggressive snakes and is also considered as one of the medically important snakes in the world (Warrell 1989; Suraweera et al., 2020). Russell’s viper venom (RVV) is primarily hemotoxic and crude RVV has shown apoptotic effects on human lung cancer cells A-549 (Pathan et al., 2015).
The present studies involve the isolation of two small molecular weight proteins from Russell’s viper venom (RVV) and study their cytotoxic activities on human breast cancer cell MCF-7 in vitro. The proteins E1P1 and E1P2 were obtained after Cation exchange chromatography followed by size-exclusion high performance liquid chromatography (SE-HPLC). Observations on the effects of only E1P1is presented here. The isolated E1P1has shown cytotoxic and cytostatic activities on MCF-7 breast cancer cell line, in vitro. This was confirmed using trypan blue and Resazurin cell viability assays. The toxins caused morphological changes and nuclear damage in MCF-7 cells as visualized using a confocal microscope. It has also shown inhibition of ADP induced platelet aggregation activity. Both the toxins are under investigation to reveal the mechanisms of action. Studies on these toxins may lead to a novel drug discovery in future.