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Health Care

Japan sees poop as valuable resource for health research, business

Universities and companies are studying feces for medical breakthroughs

Metagen Therapeutics, a Yamagata-based startup, is trying to utilize aggregated intestinal bacteria data for drug discovery with Juntendo University and others.

TOKYO -- Human poop is attracting growing attention from Japanese medical researchers and health care businesses as a potentially valuable resource for developing new treatments or products.

In fecal transplant treatments, bacteria from a healthy person's intestines are transferred to those of a patient. In addition, new drugs have been developed and manufactured from donated human poop.

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