"Using Fecal Microbiota Transplantation To Fight Disease In The Gut" - Polly Shulman
Physicians are increasingly turning to an exciting, if icky procedure: Fecal transplants. Doctors take somebody else’s fecal matter and place it in the patient’s colon. While fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) dates back at least to 4th century China, its systematic use in the United States is more recent. In the 1980s doctors discovered that fecal transplants could effectively treat intestinal infections caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile, and in 2013 the FDA classified fecal matter as a drug. Our bodies are also home to more than 10 trillion bacteria, maybe even outnumbering our own cells. Some 10 trillion of these microbes make their home in the intestinal tract, almost all in the large intestine, also called the colon. Ari Grinspan, MD, assistant professor of medicine and gastroenterology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and director of GI Microbial Therapeutics at Mount Sinai Hospital, was the first person to perform a fecal transplant at Mount Sinai. “The microbiota makes all sorts of enzymes and signals and neurotransmitters that can interact with the human cells that line the colon,” he said. “There’s all this crosstalk that we’re really just beginning to understand.”
- Ari Grinspan, MD, Assistant Professor, Medicine, Gastroenterology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Director, GI Microbial Therapeutics, Mount Sinai Hospital