mellitus and obesity. For instance, a pilot trial has shown
through
FMT that the gut microbiota from lean donors
increased
the insulin sensitivity of obese subjects [14
].
Nevertheless,
to bring the benefits of FMT to the broad
public,
it is clear that major advances in safety (e.g.
transmission
of viruses and pathogens), product development
and formulation of the microbiota constituents
are
still necessary. One solution for the safety issues could
be
cryopreservation of own processed stool samples,
similar
as for blood and germ cells. However, this cannot
be
done retrospectively for patients already having a
dysbiosis
and will definitely be at a high cost. Moreover,
timing
of sampling before onset of dysbiosis would be
crucial.
Alternatively, many different groups are now
developing
an optimal, minimal synthetic mixture of
human
stool bacteria that have the same clinical benefits
as
FMT. For instance, a study that has attracted a lot of
attention
is the ‘rePOOPulate’ study with a stool substitute
of 33 phylogenetically diverse isolates from a
healthy
donor, which was able to treat two patients
infected
with a hypervirulent C. difficile strain within
2–3
days [15
]. However, this study is also often