Unusual therapy for gut flora
Doctors at the Hannover Medical School (MHH) have succeeded in curing a patient suffering from a life-threatening diarrhoeal disease with an unusual treatment method: They transplanted a healthy individual’s faeces into his gut, which displaced the pathogens. This method of faecal transplantation is currently being researched at the DZIF.
The healthy donor’s bacteria displaced the pathogen Clostridium difficile, which had been causing recurrent infections in the patient’s gut. “Clostridium difficile is one of the most aggressive diarrhoeal pathogens. Despite treatment with antibiotics, around a quarter of the infected patients develop a relapse within a few weeks,” explains Dr Oliver Bachmann, senior physician at the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at the MHH and DZIF researcher.
Although, in Germany, faecal transplants have not yet been approved as a treatment method, they are conducted for individual treatment in compassionate-use settings in some hospitals. The method involves administering specially prepared donor stool from a healthy individual to the patient’s ascending colon during a colonoscopy. The transferred bacteria colonise the receiver’s gut and cater for healthy interactions between the microorganisms—hence displacing the pathogens.
The method has not been properly researched as yet. It is not yet known, for example, precisely which bacteria and which mechanisms are responsible for displacing Clostridium difficile in the gut. There is also insufficient information available regarding the long-term effects. Together with colleagues from Cologne, Munich, Tübingen and Lübeck, doctors from the MHH are getting to the bottom of this question, and others, in a DZIF trial—the first clinical trial which has been initiated by the DZIF alone.
