Hey everyone, in gross news this week, the latest clinical trials for poop pills that could fight a horrible gut infection failed.

But that doesn't mean we flush this research down the toilet.

I'm Anna Rothschild, and this is Gross Science.

Ok, so I've talked about fecal transplants and Clostridium difficile, or C. diff on the show before.

Basically, C. diff is an awful, and sometime life-threatening bacterial infection of the gut.

And it's really hard to get rid of.

So, doctors have begun turning to a very strange solution-something called fecal transplants.

Long story short, they take poop from healthy donors and give it to people with C. diff, and many patients have shown improvement.

The idea is that the good bacteria help outcompete the bad bacteria.

For lots more detail on this though, please go check out my previous video on the subject.

Now, some common ways of administering fecal transplants have been pumping someone else's poop into your gut, either through your anus or through your nose.

And, that sounds like...the absolute worst thing ever?!

So, some labs have been trying to create a poop pill that could do the same thing.

And one company, called Seres Therapeutics, has been attempting to do something perhaps even more ambitious.

They've taken just the healthy bacterial spores from species that are present in people's guts, and put them in a pill.

The appealing thing about this strategy is that it not only ensures the removal of any harmful bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites from the feces, but it allows doctors to make sure all patients are getting the same dose of bacteria.

Now, the first round of clinical trials went great.

After 8 weeks, 26 out of 30 patients didn't have C. diff in their stool.

But the pills just went through another round of trials, and this time they compared the pills to a placebo.

And sadly, they found no statistically significant difference in patient outcomes between the two groups.

This is a total bummer.

Obviously, it would be great if we had an easy way to cure the hundreds of thousands of people who come down with C. diff every year.

But just because this particular trial failed, doesn't mean poop pills are history.

There are plenty of reasons this test may not have worked that just involve a design flaw.

But it's also possible that we just don't yet understand what it is about typical fecal transplants that makes them so effective.

What are the ineffable qualities of poop and the microbiome that make them so powerful?

While results like this are deeply disappointing, this is all part of the scientific process.

I spoke to a rep from Seres Therapeutics and they're gonna keep working on their poop pill.

And that's a good lesson to remember, both as someone interested in science and just as a person living on this planet.

Sometimes, setbacks remind you of what you still have to learn-and how many amazing questions there are out there.

And just because you fail doesn't mean you give up-especially when people's health is on the line.

Ew.