You are currently viewing the summary.
View Full TextLog in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
More options
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
Summary
In the fourth century, a Chinese practitioner reportedly used the stool of healthy subjects to treat patients with diarrhea (1). In 1958, fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) was reported as a treatment for Clostridium difficile infection that was resistant to antibiotics (2). FMT became an option for routine treatment for such infections in 2013, after a clinical trial demonstrated a higher response rate in C. difficile–infected patients treated with FMT (81%) compared to those treated with an antibiotic (31%) (3). Since then, interest in FMT has evolved in diverse clinical settings. In cancer, studies on hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, arguably the first immunotherapy of the modern cancer era, have suggested a role for the gut microbiota in clinical outcomes (4). On pages 602 and 595 of this issue, Baruch et al. (5) and Davar et al. (6), respectively, report that manipulating the gut microbiota may allow cancer patients to overcome resistance to immunotherapy.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
