A Canadian veterinarian who works as a pet dewormer technician has been attracting attention on TikTok and Facebook with a video showing him telling how he cured his advanced lung cancer with the dog wormer drug fenbendazole. The antiparasitic medication isn’t approved in humans for any purpose, but some preclinical studies have found it can slow cancer cell growth in cultured cells and animals. While researchers consider further study into this class of drugs to be valuable, it’s important to understand that a single anecdotal case doesn’t prove a drug cures cancer in humans.
In the video, Dr. Joe Tippens claims to have used fenbendazole along with other conventional cancer treatments, and that the combination of those medications made him completely cancer free. But Tippens didn’t provide any documentation or details about his supposedly miraculous remission, so it is impossible to determine if he truly did benefit from the combination of fenbendazole and traditional treatment methods.
According to Tippens, he had no symptoms of any cancer at all for over three years while taking the antiparasitic medication, and was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer only after his wife insisted on getting him a second opinion. In his video, he claims that doctors were puzzled by his remission and could not explain why it happened so quickly.
Tippens states that he is “never going back” to the cancer center where he originally received treatment, and now wants to help others use his story as a model to beat their own disease. He says that he has been able to keep his lung cancer in remission for more than seven years by following a strict diet, getting regular acupuncture, and taking a medication called fenbendazole.
Using a colony formation assay, the team determined that 24-h incubation with high doses of fenbendazole significantly reduced the number of EMT6 tumor cells and their clonogenicity. The data also showed that fenbendazole has both cytotoxic and cytostatic effects on these tumor cells at the concentrations tested.
In a separate experiment, the team tested the effect of fenbendazole on the radiation response of EMT6 tumor cells in vitro. In these experiments, cultures were sealed in glass bottles that were made hypoxic by inserting needles for the influx and efflux of gases, and purged of oxygen by gassing with a mixture containing 1 ppm oxygen (see the Methods section of the figure). Survival curves in these hypoxic cultures demonstrated that 2-h treatments of fenbendazole did not affect the viability of EMT6 cells, even at drug concentrations that were close to the limit of solubility.
However, 3-d treatment with fenbendazole significantly reduced both the viability of EMT6 cells and their radiation response. This effect of fenbendazole in hypoxia is similar to that seen with other hypoxia-selective nitroheterocyclic chemotherapeutics and radiosensitizers, such as taxanes and vinca alkaloids. fenbendazole for humans cancer
