VIDEO: Preventative strategies for C. difficile infection

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I think it’s important when you’re talking about this space to really distinguish treatment from preventative options. Thinking about this, the patient has a treatment strategy and again, the treatment right now is always an antibiotic. There is no other therapy that is studied for the treatment of C. diff.

So once a patient has recurrent C. diff, we think about treatment — again, always with an antibiotic — and then a preventative strategy. There are several preventative strategies that are currently available, like bezlotoxumab, for example, or sort of more traditional fecal microbiota transplantation. Those, again, are used after courses of antibiotics to prevent a subsequent recurrence.

We now, of course, have LBPs that are coming to market. One is already here, in Rebyota (Ferring Pharmaceuticals). We know that SER-109 (Seres Therapeutics) is likely to be coming to market any day now. And then we just saw, just this past week, I think, the Vedanta phase 2 trial was just published as well, and that’ll be the first synthetic product, so not derived from human stool. And these are all, again, looking at prevention of recurrence.

And so I think this is certainly exciting, an exciting time to be in this field, and a really great moment for patients, because we are going to have a lot of options to hopefully continue to prevent disease and prevent multiply recurrent C. diff.