Turning poop into life-saving medical treatments — VIDEO

MEDFORD, Ma — A hundred trillion bacteria live inside your gut, some good, some bad. When patients take antibiotics for infections, sometimes they fail to work; good bacteria gets killed off while bad bacteria — C. difficile — grows unchecked.

Clostridium difficile, or “C. diff,” kills 15,000 Americans a year and sickens half a million.

The life-saving bacteria from the guts of people with healthy fecal matter can help. When their healthy microbes are placed inside the intestines of a sick person they can chase out harmful C. difficile bacteria. It’s called a fecal transplant. The treatments are administered bottom-up, through a colonoscopy, or top-down, through a tube in the nose.

Now, that smelly pile of excrement can be used to cure the sick.

OpenBiome, a public stool blank collects healthy fecal samples and turns those donations into treatments, after extensive sample screenings.

The organization says the results have been stunning. Stinky human waste is an astonishingly simple cure: 90% of the patients get better.

“They’ll actually have this really transformational experience where they’ll be going to the bathroom 20 times a day and then have normal bowel movements sort of immediately or the next day,” Smith says.

The organization’s fecal transplants cost $385 to purchase and are providing a treatment to more than 350 hospitals in 47 states.

At OpenBiome’s lab, technician Christina Kim, working under a fume hood that sucks up odors, pulls the lid off a donor’s collection bucket and demonstrates how she turns poop into the life-saving treatment.

“It’s nice that this room is actually closed off because this is where the smelly part happens,” she says.

She examines the consistency of today’s offering. A nearby chart has descriptions and illustrations for seven types of stools. It was developed by a hospital in Bristol, England, as a visual guide.

Not all poop is acceptable

Types one or two, defined by the Bristol Stool Chart as “like nuts” or “lumpy,” are too dry to process into a treatment.

If a donor’s stool is “mushy” or “watery” — that’s a type six or seven — then it can’t be used because it could be a sign the donor has a gastrointestinal infection.

The perfect poop is type three, which is “like a sausage but with cracks on its surface;” type four, which is “like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft;” or type five, “soft blobs with clear-cut edges (passed easily).”

“It’s actually an established medical chart,” Kim says with a chuckle. “It’s very important.”

Maybe it was the hot sauce he used on his quinoa and cheddar cheese casserole last night, or the banana and peanut butter he ate with a bowl of bran flakes and almond milk for breakfast, but the donor’s stool is type five, just barely acceptable for processing.

Kim scoops the feces into a clear plastic bag and adds a saline solution. For two minutes the bag sloshes around inside a machine called the “jumbo mix.” The fiber in this stool is filtered out, and what’s left behind is a liquid teaming with helpful bacteria.

With a pipette, Kim transfers the watery remnants of the poop into 250 ml plastic bottles. On average, one stool donation fills four, but today the impressive half-pound sample fills seven. One bottle equals one treatment.

The 133 treatments the donor has provided won’t be distributed until he’s passed a secondary healthy screening. For now, they sit frozen in quarantine inside a giant freezer.

Most donors head on their way after handing over their sample, but during today’s visit the donor asks if he can see the treatments he helped create.

Cool air blasts his face as Kim opens the freezer. His jaw drops at the sight of his icy brown bottles, which look like frozen chocolate milkshakes. The bacteria inside them is still alive, cryogenically preserved at -112°F.

“That’s fantastic! Holy cow!” the donor says, beaming. “It’s unreal. I never thought I would be staring at my poop frozen in a freezer destined to help people across the country. It’s really cool.”

But did he do it for the money? The ridiculously easy money?

“Not at all,” he says. “It’s a nice perk, of course.”

How to donate

If you’re inspired to donate, you have to live in the Boston area. And you may have to wait. Some 6,000 people have already signed up. OpenBiome usually invites about 50 people for interviews every week.

“It’s easier to get into MIT and Harvard than it is to get enrolled as one of our donors,” Smith says. “A lot of our donors are pretty excited to take something they do every day otherwise and save people’s lives with it.”

Reviewjournal.com contributed to this report.