When we dreamt of a magic pill that could cure anything, we weren’t thinking of poo pills — also known as “crapsules.”
But these little capsules packed with freeze-dried fecal matter have recently shown promise in treating everything from advanced cancer to deadly liver disease.
Some even say fecal transplants — in which the poop of a healthy person is transferred into someone else — could be the key to crushing it at the gym and reversing some signs of aging.
Now, UK researchers are testing whether capsules containing freeze‑dried stool from healthy donors can uproot antibiotic‐resistant bacteria hiding in patients’ guts.
Translation? Someone else’s s–t could save you from a superbug.
In the trial, 41 patients who had recently battled drug‑resistant infections were split into two groups.
One received three sets of these poo pills over three days, while the other was given placebos.
A month later, those on the real treatment were found to have healthy donor bacteria successfully colonizing their guts — a sign the pills may have flushed out the bad bugs.
“It’s very exciting,” Dr. Blair Merrick, the lead researcher at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals in London, told The BBC.
“There’s a real shift from 20 years ago where all bacteria and viruses were assumed to do you harm; to now where we realize they are completely necessary to our overall health.”
Superbugs — germs that are resistant to antibiotic treatment — are expected to cause up to 39 million deaths globally by 2050.
Microbiome researcher Chrysi Sergaki told the BBC that if the poo pills prove to be successful in further studies, fecal microbiota transplants (FMT) could be the new prescription drugs.
“We could potentially, in the future, replace antibiotics with microbiome [therapies],” she said.
“That’s the big picture, so there’s a lot of potential.”
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