Mosquito Assassin 2: Curiosity killed with A catalyst!

Question

In the last mission, my mosquito drone needed to deliver a payload of deadly substance, but most of the items either had an antidote if discovered in time or could conceivably be traced back to a buyer.

Now I'm taking a page from the Joker, I need a multi-stage poison. It needs to have 2-3 ingredients to make it react. Kind of like Antabuse only more severe. Where each of the items in your system is relatively harmless or non-toxic, but when mixed together can cause death.

And of course the coup de grace would be that the final catalyst to set off this chain reaction could be a small enough dose to be administered by my Mosquito Assassin drone.

Ideally the main ingredients would be administered through ingesting food, so the targets 'poison' themselves so it shouldn't taste to obvious if possible.

So what if any ingredients/catalysts would meet my needs?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, if there is any combination of relatively harmless chemicals that become toxic when mixed in-vivo, then they are either undocumented or classified.

The challenge in a multi-part toxin is in finding precursor compounds that are either non- or minimally- toxic in themselves, and yet are capable of reacting in-vivo to produce a highly toxic compound, without first being altered by the body's metabolism to the point where the desired reaction to produce the highly toxic substance cannot take place.

This is challenging enough, but to add the complication that the precursor compounds must be something that a human would unknowingly ingest reduces the possibilities even further, since many of the potential precursor chemicals could have an unpleasant or at least obvious taste and/or smell.

There are rumours that a viable binary poison is being developed, but these are unsubstantiated.

However, a potential avenue for producing a binary toxin would be to create a toxic compound composed of two proteins that are individually harmless, yet can combine in-vivo to produce a toxic compound. Botulinum toxin is such a two-part toxin. If the two proteins that combine to produce this toxin were produced separately, and then administered separately, the potential exists for them to combine in-vivo and then produce their toxic effects.

However, the two proteins involved would have to be administered separately in quantities much greater than that required for the compounded toxin in order to have the same toxic effect. Additionally, the proteins involved would be denatured by cooking, thus requiring that they be protected from high temperatures prior to administering them to the victim. Finally, it is unknown if these two proteins would survive for as great an amount of time in-vivo when separate (since they would both be exposing surfaces of the folded protein not normally exposed due to their bonding to one-another in normal usage) as when administered in combination, whether an immune reaction may become possible when administered separately, or if the two proteins will actually combine in-vivo to produce their toxic form.

Thus, while it may be simple to say, "Administer the two botulinum toxin proteins separately", there are many potential complications that may render this approach ineffective. However, the potential exists that modified versions of these proteins or other bacterial binary toxin proteins might prove harmless when administered alone, but combine in-vivo to produce toxic effects.