Fecal transplants cured football coachs stage 3 bowel cancer when chemo couldnt

A Mississippi high school football coach has finally reached the end zone of his cancer fight thanks to a peculiar, experimental treatment.Tim Story was diagnosed at 49 with stage 3 small bowel cancer after noticing strange pain in his sides.Two years and several challenging rounds of chemotherapy later, the Hattiesburg resident was told that the cancer had spread — and he only had a few months to live.“I’m not a crying man, but my wife and I shed some tears on the couch that day,” Story, now 53, recently told NBC News.Left with few viable paths, he enrolled in a highly experimental clinical trial in Houston that involved getting a fecal transplant from someone in the advanced stage of cancer who had been completely cured by immunotherapy.“I knew I was kind of a guinea pig, but the only other option was staying at home, and I wasn’t going to make it,” he said.At the heart of Story’s treatment was a PD-1 inhibitor — a type of immunotherapy drug.Unlike traditional cancer treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation, immunotherapy offers a more targeted approach by helping the immune system attack the tumors.First approved for cancer treatment in 2011, immunotherapy has been shown to be effective in 15% to 20% of people with certain types of cancer.The numbers are even higher — 45% to 60% — for patients like Story with tumors that have a high number of DNA mutations. In Story’s case, however, the drugs failed to make much of an impact.That was until his oncologist, Dr.

Michael Overman, came across a woman with metastatic colorectal cancer who had experienced a much better response to the drugs — her tumors had shrunk by 90% and, with a bit of surgery, she was cured.Believing that transferring the unique gut microbes from a “superdonor” like her to someone who wasn’t responding well to the drugs could be successful, Overman launched his own clinical trial with 15 patients in advanced stages of certain cancers.Participants received seve...