Professor Thomas Borody from the Centre for Digestive Disease and his team, including Dr. Gaurav Agrawal, Dr. Annabel Clancy, and Dr. Roy Huynh, have now cured Crohn's Disease. In the study, 10 Australian patients who met the criteria for the study were given a treatment of specific antibiotics combinations and doses, and/or Fecal Microbiota Transplant.
The findings of the study revealed all 10 patients to be clinically asymptomatic with a Crohn's Disease Activity Index of < 30. The CDAI is a research tool used to measure the symptoms of patients with Crohn's Disease. CDAI scores can range from 0 to 600. A cut-off value of <150 was selected to indicate that most patients below this threshold would be rated by doctors as 'very well'.
Furthermore, all participants of the study had endoscopic resolution as well as manifestations of histologically complete, deep mucosal healing. All ten patients had ceased all their treatments for Crohn's Disease. The study concluded that prolonged remission had been achieved for 3-23 years, with a median duration of treatment-free remission being 8.5 years.
What is Crohn's Disease?
Crohn's Disease is a chronic inflammatory disease of the digestive tract marked by deep ulcerations, skip lesions, transmural inflammation, fistulae, and granulomas, with no known cure, until now.
Its symptoms include diarrhea, stomach aches and cramps, fatigue or extreme tiredness, and blood in the stool. These symptoms may be constant or may come and go every now and then.
To diagnose the disease, doctors may possibly do a colonoscopy to look for any inflammation in the bowels, a biopsy to collect samples, or an MRI or CT scan.
It has a negative effect on many aspects of life, including physical, social, psychological, and sexual functioning. The majority of patients with Crohn's Disease are diagnosed in the second or third decade of life, during their most productive years.
Crohn's Disease was until today, an incurable and disabling gut disease that affects almost 3 million people worldwide. Each year, Crohn's Disease results in frequent hospitalization and surgical procedures and is considered a life-threatening illness.
Curing Crohn's Disease has been a global priority with 1,455 Crohn's Disease clinical research studies currently listed on ClinicalTrials.Gov.
What is Fecal Microbiota Transplant?
The process of FMT is done where the gut microbiome bacteria from a healthy donor's stool is placed into another patient's intestine with a damaged gut system. Also known as stool transplantation, it aims to repopulate the gut with a healthy and balanced microbiome.
Stool transplantation is used for hard-to-treat or recurrent Clostridium difficile infection, usually with three or more episodes. The intestines contain hundreds of types of bacteria. When the numbers of healthy bacteria decrease, most of the time, because of antibiotic use, harmful C difficile bacteria may multiply spread, causing diarrhea.
Although certain antibiotics treat C difficile, some people may not respond to these drugs favorably. A stool transplant may help such patients. Transplanting stool from healthy donors brings back the balance of healthy bacteria and helps clear infection.
Professor Borody said this advancement opens the way for Crohn's treatments using the antibiotic combination and what he called a "crapsule", which was an oral capsule of freeze-dried donor fecal microbiota for FMT.
