A Matching Strategy To Guide Donor Selection for Ulcerative Colitis in Fecal Microbiota Transplantation: Meta-Analysis and Analytic Hierarchy Process
Bangzhou Zhang, Luxi Yang, Hanbing Ning, Man Cao, Zhangran Chen, Qiongyun Chen, Guanghui Lian, Hailing Tang, Qizhi Wang, Junping Wang, Zhihui Lin, Jianbo Wen, Yuedong Liu, Ji Xuan, Xue-Jun Li, Aiqiang Lin, Jianquan He, Lei Zhang, Xiaohua Hou, Qiang Zeng, Chuanxing Xiao
Abstract
Modulation of gut microbiota by FMT from donors has been applied to the treatment of UC and yielded variable effectiveness in clinical trials. One possibility is that this variable effectiveness was related to donor selection, as a patient's response to FMT may rely on the capability of the used donor's microbiota to restore the specific gut disturbances of the patient. However, the biggest issues on the practical level are what should be considered in the selection process and how to set up such a donor-recipient matching model. In this study, we presented a bacterial profile-based donor-recipient matching strategy to guide donor selection for UC in FMT by first meta-analysis of 656 fecal 16S rRNA gene sequencing samples from 9 studies to identify significant indicators and then setting up the model by an analytic hierarchy process. The applicability and accuracy of this model were verified in the data sets from two previous FMT clinical studies. Our data indicate that the donor-recipient matching model built in this study enables researchers to rationally select donors for UC patients in FMT clinical practice, although it needs more samples and prospective trials for validation. The strategy adopted in this study to leverage existing data sets to build donor-recipient matching models for precision FMT is feasible for other diseases associated with gut microbiota.