While fenbendazole cancer treatment has shown promising results in animal studies, more research is needed before this dewormer can be considered as an effective cancer therapy for humans. For example, it’s unclear whether the drug could cross the blood-brain barrier and affect tumors in the brain. Furthermore, a placebo effect may explain some of the anecdotal reports that people have used this anti-parasitic drug to cure their cancer.

However, fenbendazole can be found in pet food as an anti-parasitic agent and has been shown to be very effective in treating parasites like pinworms and tapeworms. Some studies suggest that it can even kill cancer cells.

The main mechanism of fenbendazole toxicity in human cancer cells involves a partial disruption of microtubules, which causes the cell to die by starving it of vital nutrients. This is similar to the way some other anticancer drugs work, such as paclitaxel and vincristine.

Researchers also discovered that fenbendazole can inhibit glucose uptake in cancer cells, which could help the body kill the cancers by starving them of their energy source. This is a major problem for many cancers because they require large amounts of glucose to grow and spread, which can cause cellular mutations and stop the cell from repairing itself.

In addition, fenbendazole can disrupt the production of ATP in cancer cells, which can further cause the cell to die. In a study conducted in mice with pancreatic cancer, fenbendazole was shown to reduce the size of the tumors and slow down their growth. This suggests that fenbendazole can potentially be used as a treatment for pancreatic cancer, which is notoriously difficult to treat.

Another recent study showed that fenbendazole can prevent the spread of human colorectal cancer in rats. This study was carried out by Gregory Riggins, an oncologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He and his team administered mebendazole to a group of mice with either early or late-stage pancreatic cancer, and the mebendazole reduced the size of the tumors in all of the animals. In addition, it appeared to reduce the number of cancer cells in the livers and lungs of the animals.

The team at Oncotarget published this research in July, and it was the first time that a parasitic medication had been shown to be an effective cancer treatment in a preclinical trial in mice. This research is important because it shows that repurposing a parasitic drug can save time and money for the pharmaceutical industry, which usually spends years trying to develop new cancer treatments.

In the study, a group of mice were fed a diet that contained Aspiculuris tetraptera pinworms and fenbendazole. A control group was given a regular irradiated diet. During the 8-wk facility treatment, human lymphoma xenografts failed to grow in any of the 40 mice. In addition, the fenbendazole diet was more effective than the control in preventing tumor growth after transplantation, which is an important finding because this model is frequently used to study tumor biology.