Artificial poop helps people with stomach infections

Holy s**t: This artificial poop may yet help save lives. Doctors are turning to fecal transplants to treat people who suffer from intense diarrhea after taking rounds of antibiotics, National Geographic reported. "The goal is simple: recalibrate the beneficial bacteria in a person’s gut to fight off the ones that are causing them harm," it said. It said a few hundred C.difficile patients had been given stool infusions, often because they have run out of options. More than 90 percent of these people make a full recovery, National Geographic said. National Geographic reported the loss of beneficial microbes after taking antibiotics is thought to cause the diarrhea in the first place, when species like Clostridium difficile, which causes severe diarrhoea, can move in. Thus, doctors thought of fecal transplants to "fight bacteria with bacteria" and crowd out C.difficile by restoring a well-functioning microbial community in the stomach. Hurdles But the procedure faces regulatory hurdles since it does not involve a typical drug or device, and may be hard to standardize and test through randomized clinical trials, the standard of medicine. Also, there are concerns about spreading new diseases along with the helpful bacteria. "The stool needs to be freshly collected and used within several hours. And, understandably, there’s the 'ick factor' (for that reason, many people prefer that the donor be a spouse or relative)," it said. Pseudo-poo Elaine Petrof and Gregory Gloor from Kingston General Hospital in Ontario developed a kind of "pseudo-poo," a blend of 33 different gut bacteria that mimics the community of microorganisms found in a healthy gut. "This 'stool substitute' can be cooked up again and again according to the same recipe, and infused into patients without any of the extra faecal matter that makes such transplants so viscerally off-putting or potentially dangerous. Think of it as a rectally applied yoghurt," National Geographic said. “We had a lot of cases of recurrent C.difficile in our hospital. These patients were receiving stool transplants, which, although very effective, seemed like a rather crude and primitive method. We thought we could improve on it while still maintaining the same scientific concept,” said Petrof. Petrof and Gloor based their substitute on the gut bacteria of a healthy 41-year-old woman, isolating 62 species from her bowels and excluded any that showed mild signs of antibiotic resistance. "The result is a standardised bacterial broth that’s clear of any other disease-causing microbes or viruses, and that can be applied as an enema," National Geographic said. So far, the team have tested their mixture called “RePOOPulate” on two women in their 70s. One had spent 18 months in hospital with C.difficile. Ten days after receiving her stool substitute, her bowel movements were back to normal and C.difficile had been eradicated. The second woman was fighting her third bout with C.difficile—she too resumed normal bowel movements within three days of treatment. "Identifying a suitable donor can be difficult in some patients, and some doctors face institutional barriers that prevent them from offering [faecal transplants].  If a safe, effective product was available, many more patients could be treated," said Colleen Kelly from Brown University, who has used faecal transplants to treat 90 people in the last five years. Pilot study But Petrof and Gloor made it clear this is a pilot study, and are now planning to do longer experiments with animals to understand how the stool substitutes remodel an ailing gut community, as well as testing other bacterial mixtures in patients. “People are different, so the optimal mixture may vary from patient to patient,” said Petrof. — TJD, GMA News