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posted by janrinok on Monday December 05 2022, @03:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the poop dept.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/prescription-poop-is-here-fda-approves-fecal-slurry-for-unshakeable-diarrhea/

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).


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  • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday December 05 2022, @07:07PM

    by istartedi (123) on Monday December 05 2022, @07:07PM (#1281302) Journal

    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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