Swallowing poop pills can be beneficial for your health
A company in Australia has given a heads-up to a syringe treatment, which is derived from the donor’s stool into the recipient’s colon. This method is used to kick some types of bowel infections.
Clostridium difficile bacterium causes colitis, which is diarrhoea and inflammation of the colon. This infectious condition only affects people on antibiotics otherwise. Leading to a debate about whether only antibiotics should be used when prescribed by a doctor.
People are more likely to get Clostridium difficile when they are on antibiotics. The risk stays even a month after the antibiotics course because other than killing germs, they make them sick. Furthermore, antibiotics also have the tendency to wipe out good bacteria.
Poop Pills!
Bringing poop pills and faecal transplant into the equation: someone else’s poop can have restorative effects on your gut. If your gut is stripped of good bacteria because of medication, a healthy donor’s faeces sample, when swallowed or inserted in the colon, can repopulate the microbe with good bacteria.
The first-ever approval of faecal transplant has been given to BiomeBank by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration. Giving BiomeBank a heads-up for a “microbiome-based therapy product” or BIOMICTRA to treat Clostridium difficile infections, which may also be fatal.
The approach BiomeBank has is to freeze the formula derived from donor poop samples in syringes. It can then be used to deliver a colonic enema, which will contain microbiome-boosting germs during a colonoscopy. However, this is the only method that has received approval from TGA. Moreover, their chief officer Sam Forster said it has several benefits.
The advantage of delivering during a scope is that you can get a large amount there very quickly. If you took it as a pill or a capsule, it would have to pass through the upper gastrointestinal tract to get to where it wants to live. You definitely don’t want a chewable tablet.
Your problem is the volume – if you’re trying to put a few hundred millilitres [around 10 oz] of faecal material … that’s probably a normal glass size. You wouldn’t want to deliver it that way.
This approval is great for the use of microbiome therapeutics across the globe. Furthermore, one BiomeBank hope will help in improving the lives of people living with this debilitating disease.
Dr Sam Costello said,
We are excited to progress the development of our cultured microbiome-based therapies with the aim of alleviating microbiome-mediated disease on a much larger scale,
It’s an exciting time for the microbiome field and we are pleased to be pioneering new solutions to treat these diseases.
