This article was taken from the July 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
From his "Strategic Poop Reserve" in Massachusetts, bioengineer David Berry is developing "ecobiotics" -- drugs that treat disease by transforming your gut.
In January 2014, after nearly three years of development, his company, Seres Health, announced interim results from an ongoing clinical trial with SER-109, the first of these drugs with bugs. The capsules contain between five and ten strains of live micro-organisms and, so far, they've proved effective in treating an intractable bowel infection known as Clostridium difficile. "When you go from health to disease, the ecologies of the gut shift," he says. "We are picking a group of organisms with an ability to co-opt networks of disease and change them into networks of health."
Despite variations in the trillions of microbes inhabiting our bodies -- known as the microbiome -- Berry believes these biopharmaceuticals are the future for treating infections, chronic inflammation and, he claims, metabolic diseases such as diabetes.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
