Microbiota Therapeutics Program (MTP) at the University of Minnesota (Jun 2025, UMN) Donor-centric administration of the stool donor program is vital to its feasibility and patient safety FMT

[Michael Harrop]

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2508950

UMN GMP stool bank provides insights from their and other companies' experiences.

Interestingly, they mention relevant info about the donor recruitment, payment, etc. of pharmaceutical companies that recruit stool donors, but no mention of Human Microbes.

I think if UMN was genuinely interested in finding and providing a cure, they'd be working alongside me and helping any way they can. Instead, like virtually everyone else, they completely ignore Human Microbes. The way the research industrial complex ignores Human Microbes is extremely suspicious.

One clue is that UMN is not a benevolent 3rd party trying to find a cure. They're a company partnered with the ASU team/company:

• https://gutbrainaxistherapeutics.com/ - https://gutbrainaxistherapeutics.com/about

Our initial focus is on developing Microbiota Transplant Therapy (MTT) for autism and related conditions.

We are a unique company funded by 70+ autism families to help everyone with autism. Please consider joining our GBAT family of investors to help us achieve FDA approval of MTT for autism.

GBAT investors need to be accredited investors due to federal requirements. The federal definition of an accredited investor is an income of $200k/yr (or $300k/yr with spouse) or assets of $1 million (can include retirement funds).

Alexander Khoruts, MD. Chief Medical Officer

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Both ASU and UMN seem to have chosen money over a cure. And they've decided that manufacturing a "drug" is their best bet towards that end. This helps to explain how they've been able to raise so much money, and why none of their supporters care about Human Microbes. Their investors are wealthy families who also seem to have chosen money over a cure.

They don't list this in the Disclosures section:

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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And they seem to imply that they are "purely academic":

They should be overseen by Institutional Review Boards, as is currently done in strictly academic programs.

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The donor recruitment section is interesting:

An early breakthrough was achieved after the Program Director gave a series of campus lectures about FMT, which were helpful especially as these took place at a time of little public awareness about the gut microbiome.Citation28

Subsequently, a formal student group (Microbiota in Health and Medicine) was organized, which became involved in donor recruitment activities through direct engagement with student peers. Ultimately, as the Program matured, active stool donors became the most helpful recruiters through their own social networks (). Overall, the majority of our donors are either not affiliated with the University or work as staff or graduate students ().

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recent recruitment efforts by Ferring Pharmaceuticals. Its billboards and recruitment flyers blanketed entire residential neighborhoods of a large metropolitan area, sports stadiums, and the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota.

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The majority of the donors (65%) had at least one positive stool test during their participation in the program. The remaining 35% were infrequent donors, averaging 24 donations over their history of their participation.

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I believe this is a sign of poor donor quality. Good donors don't fail tests.

 

[SFBayFMT5]

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The donor recruitment section is interesting:




I believe this is a sign of poor donor quality. Good donors don't fail tests.

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How would you know, since you only test your donors once? All Gezonde Darmflora donors except for DF6, their newest donor, have failed a stool test at one time or another, since they are tested monthly--however their overall probability of testing positive on any given test is low. Most months all of their donors test negative.

 

[Michael Harrop]

How would you know

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Do you have a really bad memory? We've discussed this before, and I've repeatedly written about it on the blog and forum. Your query should also be obviously erroneous to most people, so perhaps your memory is not the issue.

1. None of my donors have ever failed a test. Testing them once is not highly relevant. If donor quality didn't matter for test results, you'd still expect some of my donors to fail a test. It's true, though, that the total number of tests I've done on donors is comparatively low.
2. I don't only test them once. It's up to recipients, and at least 1 donor has done multiple blood tests. I was going to retest at least two donors, and they declined to do it.
3. I know how to identify a high-quality donor. I've shared the answers publicly, and everyone has been too incompetent and apathetic to learn from it and test it.
4. I know the quality of donor most other places are using, and it's horrifyingly bad.

Your comment about Gezonde Darmflora aligns with the UMN report, so GD likely has donors of similar quality to UMN. Not surprising at all, and it helps highlight why I wouldn't use either donor source.