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For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has granted approval for a feces-based microbial treatment, which is used to prevent a recurring diarrheal infection that can become life-threatening.
The approval, announced Wednesday, is years in the making. Researchers have strained to harness the protective qualities of the complex, diverse, yet variable microbial communities found in healthy people's intestines and stool. Early on, rich fecal matter proved useful for restoring balance and blocking infection in those whose microbiomes have been disturbed—a state called dysbiosis, which can occur from disease and/or use of antibiotic drugs. But, our understanding of what makes a microbiome healthy, functional, and protective remains incomplete.
Doctors, meanwhile, pushed ahead, informally trying an array of methods to transplant fecal microbiota from healthy donors to the guts of patients—via enemas, tubes through the nose, and oral poop-packed capsules. Fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs) have been used to treat various ailments, from obesity to irritable bowel syndrome, to mixed success. But it quickly became apparent that FMTs were most readily effective at preventing recurrent infection from Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile or just C. diff).
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Monday December 05 2022, @04:13AM (4 children)
Just no.
I'm putting capsules filled with feces in the same file as Neuralink brain implants.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2022, @06:08AM
The target market are desperate enough.
Go figure the amount of suffering some must have had to resort to putting someone else's poop in their body: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3dk5w9/a-guide-to-do-it-yourself-fecal-transplants-thanks-youtube [vice.com]
There's plenty of evidence it works. It's just hard to standardize poop as a medical treatment. After all even the same person doesn't keep producing the same poop.
Similar situation for phage therapy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday December 05 2022, @05:07PM
People with vomiting and diarrhea that just won't stop, are very desperate people. Poop capsules, enemas, literally anything to make it stop. Then again, I remember being awfully sick the last time I got bouts of both. In the event that taking a pill could possibly cure me, even a poop filled capsule. I would definitely be on board.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday December 05 2022, @05:30PM
This is actually a wonderful step, long overdue. Fecal transplants have been used to incredible effect in the lab for decades now as something approaching a miracle cure for some kinds of persistent intestinal problems, with no significant side effects.
It originates from the growing recognition that our intestines host a diverse ecosystem of symbiotic microbes on which our health relies. It's so important in fact that roughly half the sugars in human breast milk can't be digested by human babies, but instead feed the symbiotic microbes as they establish their colonies.
And just like a macroscopic ecosystem, if that intestinal ecosystem gets too badly disrupted it can collapse to the point that it can no longer recover on its own. Especially not in a world where virtually everyone practices a level of cleanliness impossible in the world we evolved for. If you're not regularly getting a little shit in your diet, then your body has no way to replace lost species. Until a few hundred years ago that was never really a problem, quite the opposite in fact, since a whole lot of diseases evolved to transmit that way.
So now we've developed a much safer way to do what used to happen unavoidably - transplanting a chunk of healthy gut microbiome into someone whose own has collapsed. By doing so in a controlled manner, using donors who have been screened for infectious diseases, its possible to get a supercharged version of the natural method, without the accompanying risk of disease.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday December 05 2022, @07:07PM
This is not that. This is more like a blood transfusion. The only difference is that we don't understand how it works because we haven't isolated key components. There may also be an "entourage effect"--something the cannabis community has been harping on for years, so it's interesting to see the mainstream medical system acknowledge it. Essentially, it may be necessary for you to have a concoction of hundreds ore even thousands of chemicals and/or microbes in order for the therapy to work. It may also work differently depending on what's already in your system. This is way too much to sort out for our established drug approval process which is almost always based on isolating *ONE* compound and testing it. It works so well though, that they just have to accept it.
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