Faculty Academic Portal · College VII · B.J. Medical · Toxicology · Fall 2026
💉 45 MINUTES TO A FIELD KITBotox, pit-viper venom, and a shelf-stable autoinjector · Week 6 of 16🐧 NULL Active
SB
Dr. Shawn Bushy
Toxicology · Envenomation Medicine · B.J. Medical · College VII
“The right antivenom in a hospital fridge saves nobody bleeding out in a field two hours away. Chemistry gets you the molecule. Logistics gets it to the person. I teach both, because the snake doesn't wait.”
Honest flag — who this person is. OPA faculty are fictional characters. Several are honoring transforms: a real researcher’s name altered by a letter or two, with the real person named and credited on that faculty member’s own lab page. The science they teach is real and cited; the people are not.
30
Years on venom
3
Components in the kit
45
Minutes to design it
1
Python he knows by name
Active Course — TOX · a bite, and the distance to help
TOX · Envenomation Medicine
The Venom Kit — antivenom as logistics
Thirty years of envenomation medicine — the ER doctor who took the bites and stings everyone else steps back from, and who sits on the world snakebite roster because someone has to. This lab starts where a weird-news headline did: Botox and pit-viper venom, and the forty-five-minute sprint that turned them into a three-component, shelf-stable autoinjector. The chemistry is only half the lesson. The other half is the two hours between the bite and the hospital — the reason the kit has to survive heat, time, and a truck before it ever meets a patient.
TOX · B.J. Medical · College VIIMolecule → the trip to the personOmaha Animal Network
two halves of a bite — the chemistry, and the distance
The chemistry
Three components, one injector: the neutralizing agent, the stabilizer, the delivery. The Botox-and-venom crossover isn't a gimmick — both are precision neurotoxins, and understanding one sharpens the other. Get the molecule right and you've solved the easy half.
The logistics
Now get it to a person bleeding out in a field two hours from a fridge. Shelf-stable, heat-tolerant, field-deployable — the constraints that decide whether the right molecule ever arrives. Bushy runs the field side of the Omaha animal network with Dr. Clay 'Kershaw' Stevens, close enough to Lola's sanctuary to know Cleopatra the python by temperament.
Published Work — the method, on the record
Antivenom Is Logistics: Shelf-Stability as the Limiting Reagent
Bushy, S. · Journal of Wilderness & Emergency Medicine · v.22 (2023) · open access
His central argument, and the one that reframes his whole field: the hardest problem in snakebite care isn't the biochemistry of the antivenom — it's keeping it viable from a factory to a village with no cold chain. A molecule that must live in a fridge is useless where most bites happen. He treats shelf-stability not as an engineering afterthought but as the limiting reagent, the variable that decides how many people the chemistry actually reaches. The best antivenom in the world is the one that's still good when it gets there.
From Weird News to Field Kit: Rapid Design Under a Clinical Constraint
Bushy, S. · Journal of Medical Innovation Practice · v.7 (2024)
The forty-five-minute lab, written up. How a strange headline pairing Botox and pit-viper venom became a working three-component kit inside a single design session — not because the team was brilliant, but because the constraint was clear and the clock was honest. His pedagogy point: creativity under a hard, specific limit beats open-ended brainstorming, and a real deadline is a design tool, not a threat.
The method, in one line
He teaches that the molecule that can't survive the trip is worthless — that in medicine as in supply, the answer isn't finished until it reaches the person. It's why he runs a toxicology bench half-embedded in an animal-intelligence network: the vets, the snakes, the field stations are the last mile, and the last mile is where antivenom lives or dies. Chemistry is the class everyone signs up for; logistics is the one that saves the patient.
Faculty Profile
DepartmentToxicology / Emergency Medicine
BuildingB.J. Medical · College VII
Teaches1 · The Venom Kit
NetworkOmaha animal-intel (w/ Kershaw, Lola)
Rosterworld snakebite expert roster
Signaturethe field autoinjector
Preferred contactbring him a bite and a distance
Professional Merit · PMF
FIELD · CLINICAL TIER
TrackToxicology · antivenom as logistics
WVI30 years on the bites everyone else refers out
Signature movedesigns for the trip, not the lab bench
Profileturned a headline into a field kit in 45 minutes
💉 THE AUTOINJECTOR — Bushy's methodology-object
His “notebook” is a kit that works two hours from a fridge.
Mendez keeps a baseline; Bushy keeps a kit — three components in one injector, built to survive everything between the factory and the field. It's his whole philosophy made physical: the chemistry is necessary but not sufficient, because a bite happens where the hospital isn't. Every choice in the design answers to the trip — heat tolerance over elegance, shelf life over shelf appeal, one-hand operation over precision only a clinic allows. He hands students the kit and the constraint together, because the constraint is the lesson: the molecule you can't deliver is a molecule you didn't make.
Dean Janet Chen's house of medicine, where the chemistry gets its rigor.
🐧 NULL OBSERVATION · FACULTY FILE — DR. SHAWN BUSHY
Bushy is a clinician who thinks like a logistician, which NULL initially filed as a category error and then reclassified as the whole point. He is genuinely uninterested in the most elegant antivenom; he wants the one that's still viable after a day in a hot truck. NULL traced his forty-five-minute field-kit design and found the speed came from ruthlessness about the constraint — every option that couldn't survive the trip was killed on sight, and what remained was buildable. NULL Assessment: he treats distance as a reagent. The venom is real, the two hours are real, the person in the field is real — and he designs backward from them, not forward from the bench.