
When Feces Is the Best Medicine - sizzle
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/when-feces-is-the-best-medicine/379491/?single_page=true
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tjradcliffe
"Someday, a commercial product may replace stool, making some of these issues
less fraught..."

A synthetic product has been developed in Canada and tested successfully:
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fake-
fecal...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fake-fecal-
transplants-for-gut-repo-13-01-10/)

Curiously, one of the barriers to commercialization cited is the easy, low-
cost availability of the "natural" alternative:

"However, economic barriers to such a synthetic pill are significant. Elaine
Petrof, an infectious-disease expert at Queen’s University in Kingston,
Ontario, has created RePOOPulate, a mix of 33 different types of bacteria
grown in the lab to mimic the microbiome1. Her team spent two years getting
the equipment to grow the bacteria up and running, but the process is still
expensive and the bacteria finicky. 'Honestly, good luck to you,' she says to
companies trying to commercialize the technology.

The high cost of producing bacteria in this way would be less of a barrier if
the alternative were not so cheap. As Tom Moore, a physician and infectious-
disease specialist in Wichita, Kansas, puts it: 'It’ll be difficult to compete
with the ready availability and very cheap costs of human poop.'"
([http://www.nature.com/news/faeces-filled-pill-stops-gut-
infe...](http://www.nature.com/news/faeces-filled-pill-stops-gut-
infection-1.13885))

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7Figures2Commas
My startup, stool.io, provides on-demand stool for these types of transplants.
We hope to become Instacart for fecal material.

A lot of investors initially told me that stool.io was a crappy idea, but
thanks to growing acceptance of fecal transplants, we recently raised a small
seed round.

~~~
kijin
Heh, stool input and output. Cool name for a fecal transplant company. Too bad
poop.io is already taken. If you wait too long, your own startup's name might
be taken, too:

    
    
        $ whois stool.io
        Domain stool.io is available for purchase
        Please visit http://www.nic.io/ for more information

~~~
7Figures2Commas
Looks like my co-founder has failed me. Time for an Ask HN: My co-founder
didn't register our domain!

~~~
jacquesm
You're in deep shit.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
No shit!

~~~
kijin
"No shit" is literally the greatest danger that your startup will ever face :p

~~~
bsamuels
if it wasnt full of shit, they wouldnt be able to raise money in the first
place!

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keyanp
It is regrettable that such an effective and relatively safe treatment has
received so much opposition due primarily to social stigma. Instead the
healthcare system has chosen to trap patients into a cycle of using
antibiotics to treat antibiotic associated infections and risk disease
recurrence...

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refurb
Social stigma? How so? I didn't see that referred to at all in the article.

~~~
penprog
It was talked about when it was said how it was embarrassing for patients to
have to find their own donors.

