ARE YOU READY TO SWALLOW A PILL FULL OF POOP? FECAL TRANSPLA NTS MAY BE A MIRA CLE CURE FOR SOME OF OUR NASTIEST ILLNESSES. JUST SAY A HHH

摘要

For a while there, SeresThera-peutics was the most promising name in poop. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts-in the same building as Crispr Therapeutics, one of the key players in gene editing today-the biotech company has been trying to transform medicine by harnessing the billions of bacteria in people's intestines. Those bacteria, plus others that live in and on the body, make up the human microbiome, an invisible world that is only recently coming into focus. Scientists now know that the wrong balance of bugs in your gut-a delicate ecosystem that can collapse as you age, travel, or even take new medication-can lead to all sorts of distress. Seres is one of the first startups aiming to design treatments that would manipulate the microbiome to repair bad guts and cure diseases. When it went public last year, the company was valued at $133.7 million, a vote of confidence for its first drug candidate: a set of microbes distilled from human feces, washed with ethanol, and condensed into a pill.