For tabloid newspapers, it’s hard to surpass the idea of curing cancer with poo as the ideal science story.

Lay media is understandably intrigued by faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) and highly prone to telling readers there is ‘new hope for patients’ – often based on mouse studies.

Murine models of faecal transplantation have, of course, been claimed to show promise in a variety of medical conditions, including cancer, liver disease, renal dysfunction, lung disease and pancreatitis.

But even given the limitations of preclinical studies, there are reasons to question the enthusiasm, according to a group of international researchers who have called out what they claim are scores of publications rife with misleading and false-positive results.