Would You Donate Your Poop for $13,000?

Medford residents in need of a little extra cash might not have to head to the blood bank anymore. Instead of sitting in a cold room that smells of rubbing alcohol for an hour while a nurse pumps the plasma out of your arm, you could be getting paid for something that leaves your body naturally – your poop.

Openbiome, a Medford-based company, pays donors $40 for every stool donation, plus an extra $50 if they donate five days a week. That equals to $250 a week, or $13,000 a year.

But with any good thing, there is a catch. Openbiome will only pay you for your poo if you pass a rigorous medical questionnaire, stool and blood test. When it comes to poop, they only want the best of the best.

The company isn’t collecting feces just for the fun of it; Openbiome aims to make fecal transplant treatments more accessible to those who need them.

Openbiome is the country’s first public stool bank and grew to work with 150 hospitals within their first year of collection.

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The company started with two MIT students, Mark Smith and James Burgess, who had a friend who suffered from a gut infection called C. difficile in 2011, according to Openbiome’s indiegogo page. Their friend, who was experiencing nausea, pain and diarrhea up to 10 times a day, heard about a procedure called Fecal Microbiota Transplant (FMT) which scientists reported had a 90 percent success rate for curing C. difficile.

The only problem: he couldn’t find anyone to treat him.

“In the end, he treated himself at home, using his roommate’s stool, a blender, and a glorified turkey baster,” Smith and Burgess wrote on Indiegogo.

Without enough approved donors out there or enough trained staff screening the poo, fecal transplants are hard to find.

And that’s where Openbiome comes in. The company hopes to provide enough stool to hospitals across the country that anyone who needs a transplant can access one within a two hour drive from their home.

“Because chronic diarrhea and road trips just don’t mix,” Burgess said in a video.

Read more about Openbiome’s donation process on the company’s website or stop by the OpenBiome lab at 196 Boston Ave, Suite 1000 in Medford.

Image via screenshot