The venom of the world's deadliest snail became a non-addictive painkiller

Cone snails harpoon prey with a venom-loaded, disposable tooth, and one species' venom is potent enough to kill a human. Scientists isolated a single component of that venom and turned it into ziconotide, a drug roughly 1,000 times more powerful than morphine for chronic pain, but without morphine's addiction risk because it works through a completely different channel in the nervous system. It's now used in patients for whom opioids have stopped working.

— Species account, Cone snail — Genus Conus; ziconotide approved by the FDA in 2004