When Feces Is the Best Medicine
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
A synthetic product has been developed in Canada and tested successfully: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fake-fecal...
Curiously, one of the barriers to commercialization cited is the easy, low-cost availability of the "natural" alternative:
"However, economic barriers to such a synthetic pill are significant. Elaine Petrof, an infectious-disease expert at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has created RePOOPulate, a mix of 33 different types of bacteria grown in the lab to mimic the microbiome1. Her team spent two years getting the equipment to grow the bacteria up and running, but the process is still expensive and the bacteria finicky. 'Honestly, good luck to you,' she says to companies trying to commercialize the technology.
The high cost of producing bacteria in this way would be less of a barrier if the alternative were not so cheap. As Tom Moore, a physician and infectious-disease specialist in Wichita, Kansas, puts it: 'It’ll be difficult to compete with the ready availability and very cheap costs of human poop.'" (http://www.nature.com/news/faeces-filled-pill-stops-gut-infe...)
A lot of investors initially told me that stool.io was a crappy idea, but thanks to growing acceptance of fecal transplants, we recently raised a small seed round.
$ whois stool.io
Domain stool.io is available for purchase
Please visit http://www.nic.io/ for more informationI think there are people on the front lines who have a good idea of the technologies and treatments that work. The biggest impediments to implementation are often the insurers and regulators. Getting the unnecessary bits out of the way would likely result in a better and less expensive health care system in the US.
This article is a good example of plausible innovation being stymied and I'm sure it's not the only one.
Medical history is littered with extravagant claims for new medical treatments that end up being due to the placebo effect. Bear in mind that fecal transplant will have a HUGE placebo effect, so you need to rule that out before postulating that the treatment itself has any effect.
The technique only recently received validation by a leading journal (NEJM). It will take time and additional studies before it is widely adopted. Keep in mind that while the limited case studies have shown minimal side effects, others will be seen as the sample size grows. It is never a completely benign process to expose one's bodily fluids to another.