SA scientists creating a ‘super stool’ – synthetic material based on human poo that can cure serious gut ailments

Angela Cook had a human poo transplant that changed her life. Now SA scientists are working on a synthetic alternative to the somewhat icky procedure.

A South Australian company is creating a “super stool” to heal bad guts – an artificial lump of human-like faecal matter bristling with good bacteria that can be transplanted into a patient needing a biome boost.

And it could make the state flushed with success, as a lucrative export market looms.

Faecal microbiota transplantations (FMT) are currently done using healthy volunteers who donate their faecal matter, which is put into a person to treat chronic gut infections.

This is time-consuming, expensive, difficult to do on a large scale – and for some a little icky.

Thebarton-based biotechnology company BiomeBank, in collaboration with RMIT University, has secured $100,000 from the Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre to develop new “bioreactor” technology replicating the complex community of microbes in the human gut.

The company is the nation’s first public stool bank and pays donors for poos which are sent interstate and overseas for transplants to people with bowel disorders including Clostridioides difficile infection and ulcerative colitis.

Angela Cook received a faecal transplant last year for a debilitating health condition – she says “after about three days I was cured and haven’t had any problems since”. Picture: Emma Brasier

BiomeBank chief executive Thomas Mitchell said the work could be “a game-changer,” enabling microbial therapies to reach more patients around the world.

“BiomeBank will use this new manufacturing technology to develop second-generation therapies to treat multiple diseases for the broader market,” he said,

Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre’s Dr Matthew Young forecast the project would create a manufacturing industry for microbial therapies.

“If successful, the manufacturing technology developed as part of the project will allow BiomeBank to manufacture synthetic FMT or defined microbial products in a controlled, standardised way, ensuring quality, safety and efficacy, and opening up new business and export opportunities for high-value medical treatments,” he said.

RMIT researchers Professor Namita Choudhury, Professor Naba Dutta and Dr Srinivas Mettu will lead the work, building on the team’s success in developing technology to produce multiple strains of probiotic bacteria in a single bioreactor.

Angela Cook, 69, of Parkside can joke about her own 2017 transplant but more seriously describes it as “an absolute miracle”, curing her of sudden bouts of severe diarrhoea brought on by a Clostridioides difficile infection.

She ended up in Flinders Medical Centre after several treatments with antibiotics over the course of a year and was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for a transplant.

“I had lost about 22kg as I was essentially malnourished, and after researching it and seeing it had a 95 per cent success rate I was very keen for it,” she said.

“It is essentially like a colonoscopy – they put a camera up there to have a look at your insides then put in the pellet. The result was an absolute miracle, after about three days I was cured and haven’t had any problems since.”