…Morton was referred to Doctor Thomas Borody, a gastroenterologist and FMT pioneer, who prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs and – the game changer, according to Morton – faecal capsules, made bespoke at Borody’s Sydney clinic.
Morton, who takes four capsules each day, has been symptom-free since September 2016.
“It feels fantastic. It allows me to live a normal life. It actually feels good to have hope, as well, that the condition is being cured. I believe it’s working,” he says.
Morton’s belief may have good grounds. A trial published in The Lancet in early 2017, co-designed by Borody, found that FMT led to complete remission in just over one in four patients with ulcerative colitis. And a study in for JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, in November found that for C. difficile, in which FMT is up to 90 per cent effective, crapsules worked just as well as FMT via colonoscopy.
How does it work?
“When you put in stool, the bugs are capable of producing molecules that are able to kill the C. difficile. We also feel that similar mechanisms do this in patients with colitis … there are probably bacteria that cause colitis,” says Borody.
You might think the yuck factor would put people off. The reality, according to Borody, is anything but.
Doctor Thomas Borody at the Centre for Digestive Diseases in Five Dock, NSW.
Photo: Wolter Peeters
“We don’t have to suggest it to anybody because people are breaking walls down just to try and come here for FMT. The trouble that we could have is the following; people wanting faecal transplants so they can be taller, to make their hair grow,” he says.
Indeed there is a whiff of snake oil about FMT, fuelled by its apparent promise across such a wide spectrum of disease. But the procedure is racking up some serious research attention.
A trial underway at Massachusetts General Hospital, due for completion in June, is giving obese people faecal capsules sourced from lean people to see if they lose weight.
It’s based on the idea that the gut microbiome – the roughly 1-2 kilos of bacteria that are permanent residents of your bowel – comes in lean and obese models. There is evidence that certain bugs allow more calories to be extracted from a given food mass and can trigger secretion of hunger-producing hormones such as ghrelin.
In a dramatic case study from 2015, a woman got new-onset obesity after receiving FMT from an obese donor – her daughter.
Poop researchers also have cancer in their sights. In January, a study in the journal Science reportedthat people who had good gut bacteria wiped out by antibiotics did worse on treatment for lung and kidney cancer. The finding may reflect yet another talent of gut bugs – to modify the immune system.