Fecal transplants cured football coach’s stage 3 bowel cancer when chemo couldn’t

A Mississippi high school football coach has finally reached the end zone of his cancer fight thanks to a peculiar, experimental treatment.

Tim Story was diagnosed at 49 with stage 3 small bowel cancer after noticing strange pain in his sides. Two years and several challenging rounds of chemotherapy later, the Hattiesburg resident was told that the cancer had spread — and he only had a few months to live.

“I’m not a crying man, but my wife and I shed some tears on the couch that day,” Story, now 53, recently told NBC News.

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Left with few viable paths, he enrolled in a highly experimental clinical trial in Houston that involved getting a fecal transplant from someone in the advanced stage of cancer who had been completely cured by immunotherapy.

“I knew I was kind of a guinea pig, but the only other option was staying at home, and I wasn’t going to make it,” he said.

At the heart of Story’s treatment was a PD-1 inhibitor — a type of immunotherapy drug.

Unlike traditional cancer treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation, immunotherapy offers a more targeted approach by helping the immune system attack the tumors.

First approved for cancer treatment in 2011, immunotherapy has been shown to be effective in 15% to 20% of people with certain types of cancer.

The numbers are even higher — 45% to 60% — for patients like Story with tumors that have a high number of DNA mutations. 

In Story’s case, however, the drugs failed to make much of an impact.

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That was until his oncologist, Dr. Michael Overman, came across a woman with metastatic colorectal cancer who had experienced a much better response to the drugs — her tumors had shrunk by 90% and, with a bit of surgery, she was cured.

Believing that transferring the unique gut microbes from a “superdonor” like her to someone who wasn’t responding well to the drugs could be successful, Overman launched his own clinical trial with 15 patients in advanced stages of certain cancers.

Participants received several infusions of the superdonor’s stool for one month, and five of the patients got additional oral doses — in the form of freeze-dried capsules — for another six months.

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Only three participants underwent temporary remission. But Story was lucky — his tumors began to vanish and, by the fall of 2024, he was officially cured.

“By then, they were pretty definitive that the cancer had gone away,” Story told NBC News. “For me and my wife, it felt like winning the lottery, because before the trial we had no options left.”

They may sound bizarre, but “poop pills” were approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2023 for fecal transplants. 

Researchers in Canada five-year survival rate of 13%.

For Story, the innovative treatment has been nothing short of a miracle.

“I’m a Christian, and I believe God got me through this for whatever reason because he’s got something else planned for me,” he said.

“This past fall, I’ve been able to go back to work for the first time in four years. I’m back coaching football and teaching schools. It’s my passion. I’ve missed it so much because I had to retire. Now it feels like I’ve had a second chance at life.”