The Quest to Turn Human Waste Into Medicine
December 14, 2024 at 12:27AMThe benefits of human gut microbiota are well-known. For example, fecal microbiota transplants have shown to be an effective treatment for C. diff. (Lina Zeldovich’s “The Magic Poop Potion,” one of the stories in our “Really Good Shit” reading list, goes deeper into the subject.) But the idea of microbiome-based treatments hasn’t taken off on a wider commercial scale. In this Bloomberg Businessweek feature, Jason Gale writes about MaaT Pharma, a biotech company in France pioneering fecal-based therapies to treat cancer. MaaT Pharma’s research is promising, and as Gale reports, it’s very close to being the first company to gain approval for a microbiome-related product. A fascinating read—if you can stomach it.
To that end, MaaT has already marked out land for a new plant that could increase manufacturing capacity tenfold by 2030. Poo bugs grow like sourdough yeast. If you keep them in the right conditions—at body temperature and with limited or no oxygen—and feed them right, they replicate exponentially. MaaT’s research team can now produce 4,000 liters (1,057 gallons) of fecal microbes from less than a teaspoon of liquid stool in 15 days. In Affagard’s vision of the future, artificial intelligence will be used to mix and match batches of gut microbes grown in giant incubators from MaaT’s vast collection of frozen stool samples. These germs can then be freeze-dried and turned into more convenient oral formulations, jokingly referred to as “crapsules.” Such capsules are opaque and white in color, and there’s no odor, as the poop germs have been desiccated and won’t be reanimated until they hit the gut. There’s still a potential “ick” factor, but it would be far more comfortable for patients than the current enema approach. And much cheaper: One factor holding back adoption of microbial therapies has been their relatively high cost, which analysts estimate can be in the tens of thousands of dollars, even topping $130,000, per treatment course. Whether this is covered by insurance varies wildly between countries, products and insurers.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/13/the-quest-to-turn-human-waste-into-medicine/
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