Human stool as a tissue not a drug .. great idea from Smith, Kelly, Alm

Just got done reading this: Policy: How to regulate faecal transplants : Nature News & Comment by Mark Smith, Colleen Kelly and Eric Alm.  I was pointed to it by a Tweet from Marc Pallen

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And, well, I rarely says this, but it kind of blew my mind. First, i should note that the authors (who include the cofounders of OpenBiome which I wrote about a few weeks ago.  Anyway, they argue that – especially in light of the use of stool transplants for various purposes – human stool should be considered as a tissue not a drug.  I have written and talked about the FDA getting involved in regulating fecal transplants quite a bit and confess this idea had never occurred to me.  Now – I don’t work directly on fecal transplants, but I have been promoting the idea on and off that the human microbiome is in some ways akin to an organ and Smith et al. reference a similar argument in their article.  And it follows in a way that one could view the microbiome / stool as a tissue.  But I am not aware of anyone promoting this idea to the FDA in terms of regulation until this article (correct me if anyone knows any differently).

Anyway – just wanted to make people aware of this essay and add in my 1st impressions.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

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