The leading U.S. clinic hopes its fecal waste biobank will help researchers make new discoveries about how to treat cancer patients, one of several efforts to turn human waste into medicine.

Mayo Clinic Biobank is part of researchers’ years of “personalizing” drugs by discovering how the microbiome changes how patients respond to cancer drugs.

“If I could figure out the drug they most likely respond by looking at someone’s microbiome and their genes, I would like to take that drug as a first step,” said Purna Kashyap, head of Mayo Clinic’s microbiology program, overseeing the biobank.

By contrast, most cancer drugs today are used as a regimen, or as Kashyap describes: “Everyone sees it as a first-line therapy, everyone sees it as a second-line therapy, everyone sees it as a third-line therapy.”

The clinic strives to understand that the core of the microbiome is a biobank of over 2,000 fecal samples, a collection of ICK factors — but researchers hope it can help them understand why patients respond differently to cancer treatment.

The idea behind the study is that everyone except human cells has a microbiome that collects 100tn of "microbial symbionts": bacteria. Researchers once wrote for science, “We rely on (we rely on (we) to help nutrition, fight pathogens and educate our immune systems.” These bacteria colonize our bodies from the skin to the gut.

The biobank’s work on cancer is just one of several large-scale efforts to understand how the gut microbiome mediates how patients respond to cancer treatment, such as whether the tumor responds to chemotherapy or the severity of side effects.

Along these lines, the researchers performed a gut localization with new bacteria through fecal transplants. Although still in the research phase, these trials have produced some promising results. According to a new book by Dr. Eric Topol, PhD, chair of the Department of Translational Medicine at the Scripps Institute, the researchers also looked at the researchers' investigation of the gut microbiome.

The work of the private biobank and expectations of Kashyap's hope to release some results this summer as the broader scientific community is under attack from the Trump administration. The White House proposed disproportionately significant cuts to U.S. scientific institutions, including 40% cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Although private companies and hospital systems such as Mayo Clinic are engaged in personal research, few in the research community think that a “slutty” private budget can fill the gaps at the size of the federal government.

Similarly, Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr cut about 20,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services, which harmed some government biobanks, like the approximately 50,000 gonorrhea samples from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after the entire staff, their fate is unknown.

“The biota and data collection for NIH funds are open and publicly available,” said Derek Lowe, an organic chemist and popular author of the Drug Development Pipeline Blog.

“There aren’t too many other people doing something like this.”