Banking Previous Poos: Could a Transplant of Feces from Your Past Heal You?

The Scientist spoke with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School researchers Scott Weiss and Yang-Yu Liu, who propose that people bank stool samples when they’re young and healthy so that they can be transplanted to rejuvenate the gut microbiome later on.

Written byDan Robitzski

| 9 min read

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Photo taken from the perspective of a lab worker in a white coat and purple gloves preparing multiple fecal transplant capsules at a time.

A technician from OpenBiome prepares fecal microbiota transplantation capsules for the treatment of C. difficile infections.

Image credit:OPENBIOME

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The future of personalized medicine could lie in a person’s own past. Given the influence gut microbes have over a wide variety of health conditions, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have an unusual proposal: people could bank their poop when they’re young and in good health so that it can be transplanted back into their system when their health is waning.

The idea, proposed today (June 30) as a review in Trends in Molecular Medicine, comes from existing evidence on autologous fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT)—a fecal transplant of a person’s own stool. The researchers suggest that such FMTs could rejuvenate the microbiome later in life, and in doing so, may help prevent conditions ranging from obesity to asthma, though they’re careful to avoid saying that there’s definitive proof such a procedure would help.

The Scientist spoke with coauthors Yang-Yu Liu and Scott Weiss to learn ...

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Meet the Author

Dan Robitzski
Dan is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles who joined The Scientist as a reporter and editor in 2021. Ironically, Dan’s undergraduate degree and brief career in neuroscience inspired him to write about research rather than conduct it, culminating in him earning a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University in 2017. In 2018, an Undark feature Dan and colleagues began at NYU on a questionable drug approval decision at the FDA won first place in the student category of the Association of Health Care Journalists' Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Now, Dan writes and edits stories on all aspects of the life sciences for the online news desk, and he oversees the “The Literature” and “Modus Operandi” sections of the monthly TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. Read more of his work at danrobitzski.com.
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