Previously, researchers demonstrated that a
fecal transplant—taking a healthy person’s stool and putting it in another person—results in a remarkably successful treatment of
C. difficile infections. But
scientists don’t really know why it works.
The ick-factor of receiving a fecal enema resulted in the creation of the
nonprofit stool bank OpenBiome, which aimed to create pills that could be taken orally instead. Seres Therapeutics took the idea a step further by creating the SER-109 pill. Here, spores from good bacterial species are isolated and encapsulated in pill form, while disease-spreading microbes like
Listeria and
Salmonella are eliminated.
The goal is to reintroduce the diverse population of microbes that normally live in the gut, which is disrupted during a
C. difficile infection. Researchers from Seres Therapeutics, Mayo Clinic, and Massachusetts General Hospital published
a paper in The Journal of Infectious Diseases earlier this year saying that the SER-109 treatment was effective for preventing
C. difficile infections in an early stage trial.
But results from a more advanced trial released today indicate that there was no significant difference in the outcome of patients receiving the therapy compared to those who got a placebo. In a press release, Seres noted this was “inconsistent” with their expectations.