Microbiome: Setting-up
$ 4.00

At Lifeblood we’re energized by the life-giving potential of these products, but we won’t get there on our own.

At Lifeblood, we've always been here for all Australian's. Our life-giving role started 90 years ago with blood donations, but today our capabilities stretch across organ matching, tissue typing and breast milk donations. We’re giving more life to more Australians than ever before. With your help, we can keep it up.

Microbiome
This service will be a lifeline for people with an infection called recurrent Clostridium difficile (C. difficile). Recurrent C. difficile disrupts a person’s gut microbiota — the organisms and bacteria that exist inside the digestive system. The balance of these tiny organisms is crucial to overall health, so a recurrent C. difficile infection is often debilitating and sometimes even life-threatening.

It’s a scary problem, but there’s a promising solution: faecal microbiota transplant (FMT). Someone healthy provides a stool donation, which is tested, processed, and transplanted to the patient with recurrent C. difficile. This reintroduces healthy microbiota into the infected person’s gut, curing 70 to 90 per cent of patients. If FMT had been available in 2016, approximately 2,500 people would have benefited.

At Lifeblood, our goal is to make sure that “would have” becomes “did,” by making FMT readily available across Australia. As you read this, we are busy getting a pilot facility up and running in Perth, Western Australia, with the aim of collection and testing starting at the end of this year.

Recurrent C. difficile is where we’re starting, but if past initiatives are any indication, it’s truly just the beginning. We’re excited to be joining up with research institutions around Australia to study how FMT can be used to treat other clinical indications like ulcerative colitis, Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Crohn’s disease.

Supporting Lifeblood
As a not for profit entity, we depend on financial support to deliver our world-leading products and services. When we hope to create new services and biological products to help more people, we need financial donor support to get started. This is where you come in. We hope we can count on you to help us launch our latest life-giving health initiative, Microbiome.

Your donation will help us set up our new testing, processing and storage facility.



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