Poop Pills To Cure Cancer
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. Cancer research usually involves microscopes and molecules and not toilet humor. But what if one strange little capsule could boost immunotherapy, cut side effects, and change how we fight cancer forever? A promising new treatment now in clinical trials, and that treatment is poop therapy. Pills. We're going to tell you about them with someone who's working on them. He's an immunologist and associate professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada. His name is Dr. Saman Malaki. Saman, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, David. A topic for my heart, a poop pill. Let's start here.
What is inside it? What is not inside it? And what is it? Yeah, yeah. I appreciate the enthusiasm. So it is derived from poop. So we have healthy donors.
How does poop therapy work for cancer treatment?
These are heavily screened, often college students that we screen to make sure that there is no infectious diseases. They are healthy. Everything's top notch. And then we get the poop. And the poop gets actually processed pretty much to its microbial components. And then it gets packaged in three layers of capsules. And you might have seen pictures of me holding the capsules on the internet. And then so the capsules gets frozen until a patient who is participating in one of our clinical trials identified that's eligible to take the poop pills. The patient undergoes a bowel prep, which is similar to all the folks know this if they have done a colonoscopy. I'm about to do my first one. I'm turning 40 soon.
So that's exactly what our patients go through. So they do a bowel prep. They flush their native microbiome out the day before the treatment. And then they come to the clinic. Capsules get defrosted. There is no taste. There is no odor. And they take about 35 to 40 of those capsules in about an hour. It's a lot. But that's about 80 to 100 gram equivalent of fresh stool that we got from a donor. And what we are hoping to achieve with that is to transplant the donor's microbiome, the bugs that live in the donor's naturally microbiome, into the patient, into the recipient. And that changes the person's microbiome. Now they have a fresh biome. And we can get into details why that is and what it does. Yeah, let's do that.
The gut microbiome, for those listening, it's the community of microbes and bacteria in your stomach. It is so important for your health. I heard one person call it the forgotten organ. It's as important to your health as like other organs, like the liver or your heart.
What is inside the poop pills and how are they made?
What is so important about it? What does our gut microbiome do for us? That's a great question. And it is truly a forgotten organ. So these bacteria, these microorganisms have evolved with us for millennia. They have been living with us. In fact, when you have food every day, most of that food goes to feed these bacteria. believe it or not, and that they produce a whole bunch of metabolites and molecules that supports the rest of our bodies. So the metabolites that they're producing crosses from our intestine, gets into the blood, and through the bloodstream, it gets to different organs. You might even have heard of the term gut-brain axis. So your microbiome can control your mood. It can do a lot of things that affects your brain function, and that's only one of the organs.
Another organ that it actually affects or gets affected quite a bit by our microbiome is the system that we call the immune system. So the gut is the largest immune organ in our body because we have trillions of bugs living in the gut and they have the largest number of immune cells living there to effectively, they're regulating each other. They're constantly communicating. The virus producing is metabolized. That regulates the immune system. Immune system is there to make sure everything's clean, everything's organized, nothing's getting on the other side to cause infections. So they're in constant cross-talk. And then when someone has cancer or an inflammatory condition or a disease like chronic condition, so that microbiome, the gut microbiome doesn't look normal or healthy anymore.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:03
2
How does poop therapy work for cancer treatment?
1:03–2:48
3
What is inside the poop pills and how are they made?
2:48–6:43
4
What does the bowel prep process involve for patients?
6:43–9:49
5
How does the gut microbiome affect health and cancer?
9:49–10:05
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