Tim Story, a high school football coach in Mississippi, never thought of himself as someone who gets emotional.
But when he found out he had late-stage colon cancer with only months to live, he and his wife couldn’t hold back their tears.
After surgery and chemotherapy failed to cure his cancer, Story joined a clinical trial for an unusual treatment: a fecal transplant. He was given a stool sample from a cancer patient who had been completely cured by immunotherapy.
“I knew I was taking a risk, but staying home wasn’t an option,” Story said.
The idea behind the treatment was that healthy bacteria from the donor’s gut might help his immune system recognize and fight the cancer.
A year and a half later, his tumors started shrinking. By 2024, he was cancer-free.
Story was first diagnosed in 2020 at age 49 with stage 3 small bowel cancer. Even after surgery and different treatments, the cancer spread. He had received a PD-1 inhibitor, a drug that helps the immune system attack tumors, but it didn’t work for him. That’s when doctors suggested a fecal transplant.
In 2021, researchers in the U.S. and Israel tested fecal transplants on 15 patients with advanced melanoma to see if it could help them respond better to PD-1 inhibitors. Three patients showed improvement, and Story was the only one to achieve complete remission.
His sample came from an elderly woman who had recovered from colorectal cancer after immunotherapy. Dr. Michael Overman from MD Anderson Cancer Center said her tumors shrank so much that surgery was able to remove the last of them. This led him to launch the clinical trial.
Ten patients received multiple stool infusions over a month, with five also taking capsules for six months. Story didn’t confirm whether he took the pills.
Fecal transplants are mostly used to treat bacterial infections that don’t respond to antibiotics. They are also being studied for conditions like inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome.
MD Anderson is now working with Kanvas Biosciences to create a synthetic version of the super-donor’s stool. The goal is to develop a pill that could help more cancer patients worldwide.
For Story, the trial changed everything. “Before, we had no options left. Now, I’m back to coaching football and teaching again. It feels like I got a second chance at life.”
