snake science fair 2011-2012 (my final year in high school)

[chris-uk]

I assume you know about the pubmed journal index? I used to use it a lot a medical school, it's a lot easier to use now it's on the web. Do a few searches on Home - PubMed - NCBI and see what journal articles come up - the cutting edge stuff is published in the journals way before it reaches text books.

On your orignal idea about antivenin in an epipen... biggest problem is preventing the protein from denaturing, most proteins (I believe all snake venoms are proteins, maybe a few enzymes as well) will breakdown when heated, and ambient temperatures over a short time would most likely be enough to denature the antivenin.
I'm happy to be wrong, but I think there's a reason why we don't have antivenin stored at room temp. Let us know what you find.

[d_virginiana]

I'm happy to be wrong, but I think there's a reason why we don't have antivenin stored at room temp. Let us know what you find.

I believe you're right about it denaturing. It would probably need to be kept in some sort of portable freezer-unit like what I've seen severe diabetics carry around for their insulin.
The problem there is that those are very expensive and likely wouldn't be possible to mass produce... Though it might be practical for businesses that work with a lot of venomous reptiles to have on-site.