Faecal Pellets: Watch the good bacteria chase out the bad

Imagine you get bad news: antibiotic resistant bacteria have set up a colony in your intestine. OK here’s some worse: they could escape and invade your blood, kidneys, whatever. In which case you have real problems. This is a very real scenario which that brilliant researcher Dr Blair Merrick of Guys and St Thomas Hospital has sought to address. [1] as reported by James Gallagher of the BBC Why not, he has reasoned, get some good non resistant bacteria to chase out all those bad ones? It is his chosen method which may raise more than one eyebrow among you, gentle readers

According to Dr Merrick, the way to get the good bacteria into his subjects is via pills made of…..well, made of faecal matter, you know,,,poo. To quote James:

Dr Merrick says there are “really promising signals” that poo pills could help tackle the rising scourge of superbugs and that donor bacteria could be going to microbial war with the superbugs as they compete over food and space on the lining of the gut and either rid the body of them completely or “reduce them down to a level that doesn’t cause problems”.

We like this for all sorts of reasons. Firstly the gut really is such a good harbour of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Secondly, as in all things ecological, making its flora more diverse can only be a good thing. Thirdly, we think it has a clever little principle behind it. Antibiotic resistant bacteria have devoted a tiny bit more of their genome to this purpose than non resistant ones. In the world of ecological competition, where tiny differences can make an enormous difference to long term survival, this could be crucial. If done correctly, the good non resistant ones should out compete the bad ones.

It’s early days yet, and the early trials have only been on 41 subjects But as seasoned veterans of the long wars of antibiotics will know, we at LSS welcome every initiative, however unusual it may at first seem. We wish every success to Dr Merrick and his team and hope that their early accomplishments continue in the bigger trials to come,

_{thanks to Ms G lynch}

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyge290l4xo

#gut #microbiome #antibiotic resistant bacteria #health #medicine