“While folks in the building next door at MIT were teaching monkeys to control robotic arms with their minds, and they literally invented the MRI machine across the street at Harvard, I spent a good chunk of my training working out how to help physicians give patients poop in the safest possible way,” explains Zain Kassam of his career in fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT). “The type of poop I’d feel comfortable giving to my grandmother.”
Kassam’s interest in the field of FMT was inspired by a patient he met during his gastroenterology fellowship at McMaster University in Canada. After failing her 6th round of antibiotics to treat her C. difficile, the patient agreed to Kassam’s suggestion that she try FMT. “Within 48 hours she was cured and back to gardening,” remembers Kassam. “It was the closest thing to a miracle I’d seen in medicine, and I wondered why not everyone was doing it.”
Read more at the source: The 2016 MedTech Boston 40 Under 40 Healthcare Innovators
Related
Zain Kassam: A resident’s view on the Duty Hours debate – Royal College - Listen to Zain Kassam, a 3rd year resident in Internal Medicine at McMaster University in…
Ismailimail 