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  • OUTLOOK

Therapeutic microbes to tackle disease

Modified bacteria and carefully formulated microbial communities could form the basis of new living treatments.
  1. Claire Ainsworth

    1. Claire Ainsworth is a freelance science journalist in Hampshire, UK.

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Although it happened almost a decade ago, Willem de Vos still vividly remembers his colleagues being told to halt the clinical trial they had been running. De Vos was part of the team conducting the first randomized clinical trial of faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) — faeces from healthy donors were used as a last-resort treatment for people with a devastating, recurrent gut infection caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile. About a year in, the data and safety monitoring board overseeing the trial had seen enough: the trial needed to end. But it wasn’t because the therapy didn’t work — quite the opposite. The transplants were proving so successful that it was no longer ethical to continue to give people in the control group the conventional antibiotic treatment with which the transplants were being compared. “That showed us that it worked and why it worked,” says de Vos, a microbiologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands and the University of Helsinki in Finland. The antibiotic-treated patients who relapsed were given the transplant, which cured them.

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Nature 577, S20-S22 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00201-6

This article is part of Nature Outlook: The gut microbiome, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.

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