Three Princeton graduates found fecal bank
Jasmine WangThree Princeton graduates launched a nonprofit organization in Sept. 2013 that collects stool samples and provides hospitals withscreened, filtered and frozen material for clinical use. Mark Smith ’09, James Burgess ’09 and Carolyn Edelstein ’10 created OpenBiome, which has already been featured in The New York Times. Edelstein explained that fecal transplants have been proven effective in fighting harmful intestinal bacteria, noting that while antibiotic treatments for the infection are approximately 80 percent effective, fecal matter transplantations, also known as FMTs, are around 89-92 percent effective. Smith explained that the process of an FMT starts far before one heads into the surgical room, noting that an FMT is an extremely complicated process that first requires finding a donor to undergo a very rigorous set of screenings, come in and produce fecal material to be processed.
