There's two kinds of shortage here: the availability in principle of an antivenom for a specific snake venom and the availability in practice of a dose of antiv

There's two kinds of shortage here: the availability in principle of an antivenom for a specific snake venom and the availability in practice of a dose of antivenom to treat a specific snake bite. Rich people paying whatever it takes to avoid dying provide a captive market for the first case (at least as far as snakes that rich people often get bitten by are concerned), and protein design tools also aim at this kind of shortage. But as the article points out, most people getting bitten by snakes are affected by the second kind of shortage, because they're too poor to afford several hundred dollars. To address this, the newly-designed antivenom also needs to be cheap enough to manufacture that people actually buy it in large enough volumes that it justifies the initial R&D investment for the manufacturer.