Can you make money from your poop?
Seres Therapeutics believes so. Seres is a profit biotech company in Massachusetts.
The company is developing a treatment for preventing recurrent Clostridium difficile infections that involves a lot of human excreta, according to a report by azcentral published last Thursday.
Get Paid for Your Poop 18 to 50-year-olds
“If you are a healthy adult 18 to 50 years old, you may be eligible to earn up to $1,500 a month in compensation to donate your poop (compensation may vary by city and is subject to change). Not only that, your participation could help lead to future developments in gastrointestinal infections and disorders that directly serve a patient population in need,” reads the company’s website.
Known as the GoodNature program, the initiative seeks individuals who are healthy, have regular bowel movements, with normal weights, do not smoke, are not pregnant, and do not abuse alcohol or drugs.
Representatives of the organization stated they have already recruited 150 potential donors at the Aloha Fest in Tempe. Various screenings are now being conducted on these donors to ensure they contain the bacteria required by the Seres therapeutic. According to Interesting engineering, it is now seeking regular donors who can be relied on to fill this need.
What is Seres Doing with the Poop?
Researchers use the collected human stool to test and then develop an oral microbiome medicine to treat recurrent C. diff. It achieves this by repopulating a patient’s gut with healthy bacteria that can effectively stop such infections from resurfacing. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, C. diff causes half a million illnesses and nearly 30,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. Currently, the company is waiting for U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance for its treatment.
Another company doing similar work is Seed Health, which is aimed to help researchers gain a deeper understanding of poop by creating databases of poop to train artificial intelligence on. The researchers requested that volunteers submit pictures of their turds and some information about their pooping cycle.
Similarly, in 2021, an initiative in South Korea powered its university with excrement donated in exchange for digital currencies.
