When one’s body creates harmful antibodies that attack its own tissue, or in other words experiences an autoimmune disease, the cure might be a loved one’s, or a stranger’s, poop.  

  Data collected by the Fecal Transplant Foundation revealed a 90 percent success rate for the treatment of a common and sometimes fatal intestinal bacteria called Clostridium difficile, or C. diff., by fecal transplant. The procedure is simple: a healthy donor’s stool is transferred non surgically, most commonly through colonoscopy or a nasal tube, to a person lacking healthy bacteria, restoring a prosperous and diverse population of microorganisms in the gut. According to a study released by the Center for Disease Control in 2015, 6 percent of the year’s approximately 500,000 U.S. cases of the infection were fatal.

  Despite its effectiveness against C. diff. infection, fewer than 500 patients in the United States have received fecal transplants. In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration classified the transplant as an experimental procedure, meaning it can only be performed on a trial basis, and it is not covered by medical insurance.

  “There aren’t a lot of big drug companies behind this- at least not yet, and the reason is that you can’t patent bacteria from somebody’s poop. You can’t call it your property as a company, and that’s how pharma works,” said Dr. Jayne Danska, Chair in Molecular Medicine, Genetics, and Genome Biology at the University of Toronto. Danska said, “Whether we like it or not, ‘big pharma’ has a big influence on the FDA and other regulators.”

Dr. Danska sees an urgent need for a change in the mindset about microbes that live in and on our bodies and contribute to our health, referring to what she calls the “ick factor”. “In our grandparents generation people were terrified of microbes because some of them have caused fatal infections,” Danska said. However, the majority of microbes are not harmful. In reality, the relationship between a person and their microbes is a mutually beneficial one: Danska said that “optimizing our microbes’ health optimizes our health.” Both in response to this sensitive “ick factor” and in exploration of potential uses of healthy microbes, there have been efforts to grow more refined combinations of fecal-sourced bacteria in labs.

  “It has been shown with very good experimental evidence that being obese is associated with having a disturbed composition of gut microbes,” Danska said. This recent discovery, she said, “could be part of the cause of obesity.” The fecal transplant, or a transplant of a more selective group of bacteria, “could be a part of the cure for obesity, by modifying those organisms to try to come up with a composition that provides for a healthier metabolism.” The bacterial communities in our gut have broad impacts on our bodies, so deliberate alteration of this community has the potential to address and possibly cure many diseases.