ABOVE: A fecal microbiota transplant capsule filled by staff at OpenBiome
COURTESY OF OPENBIOME
Update (December 1, 2022): The US Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that it has approved its first fecal microbiota product, Ferring Pharmaceuticals’ Rebyota, for prevention of recurrent C. difficile infection in adults.
Alexander Khoruts wishes we’d all stop using the F-word. In addition to its yucky connotations, the term “fecal transplant” is an inaccurate description of the procedure he helped pioneer, he argues, since “you can’t transplant feces.” Rather, it’s the intestinal microbiome that gets engrafted, says Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota who coauthored the first detailed how-to guide for the procedure. Accordingly, he says, he prefers the term “intestinal microbiota transplant.” As director of the university’s Microbiota Therapeutics Program, he regularly works with people who undergo the procedure, and “I’ve seen the patients really have a sigh of relief when you lose ...
