A Poopy Pill to Treat Hospital Infections

In the Cambridge (Mass.) basement of startup Seres Health sits a series of benches shrouded in rectangular vinyl tents. They’re essentially clear, vacuum-sealed cages for microbes that live without air. Seres says the organisms hold the key to a new class of biological medicine—pills that can fight the antibiotic-resistant infections sweeping U.S. hospitals. The microbial treatments come from within the human body—deep within. This is, as a whiteboard in the Seres basement puts it, the “Strategic Poop Reserve.”

It’s not as crazy, or gross, as it sounds. In the last few years, one of the most promising therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections has been the transplantation of healthy fecal matter into a patient’s gastrointestinal tract. Antibiotics kill gut bacteria indiscriminately, including healthy strains; the idea with the transplant is to wipe out antibiotic-resistant germs with healthy bacteria reinfused into the patient from donor stool. The transplant procedure, however, is difficult, invasive, and time-consuming, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been slow to approve it for wide use because the long-term effects are unknown.