Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are potential anti-cancer drugs

rom time to time researchers hear anecdotes from people doing clinical trials. Here's a true example.

A patient with advanced Alzheimer's disease was unable to talk and could barely swallow. It was impossible to measure his cognitive scores because he was essentially unresponsive. After getting the drug, he suddenly sat up and started talking. Nurses reported that he asked where he was and wished to be discharged. The next day he stopped talking again and returned to his previous state.

This may be telling us something important, namely that an Alzheimer patient is theoretically capable of some level of recovery. Or maybe the clinical personnel were only seeing what they hoped to see. Or maybe they were looking at the wrong patient by mistake. In this case it looked like a change in the right direction, so the researchers added it to their sales pitch to some corporate executives, who dismissed it as an anecdotal story.

Anecdotal stories are sometimes published as case reports by doctors in clinical practice, but rarely in clinical drug trials. The reason is psychology: If you're spending ten million dollars on a trial, you want no distractions from getting that one bit of information: does the drug do what you want or not? Once you've started a trial, you can't change your hypothesis and it's too late to go back to the lab and start over.

A clinical drug trial is an experiment. To a basic researcher, an unexpected result is a success. Clinical researchers see it as a nuisance, but we need those anecdotes. Despite their unreliability, they are the clues we need to make progress.

Ivermectin

Take ivermectin, the anti-parasitic drug that was hoped to be a treatment for COVID. We now know that ivermectin inhibits metastasis and tumor formation and growth in several types of cancer ^[1,2]. Ivermectin was discovered in 1967. It took fifty-one years before anybody noticed that it was curing cancer patients.

Or did it? How many anecdotes were there that were dismissed? Researchers rarely get information about incidental side effects of drugs during clinical trials other than adverse events. What about auspicious events? If a clinical researcher has an anecdote suggesting an off-target benefit, we need to know about it.

Hydroxychloroquine and vaccines

As many as 355 other non-cancer drugs have been demonstrated as potential anti-tumor agents ^[3] Even influenza and measles vaccines ^[4] and the infamous hydroxy­chlor­oquine are said to have antineoplastic effects.^[5] Give credit where credit is due: Trump advocated them all. Maybe he knew something . . . .

We need a repository of anecdotes. No doubt some will criticize it as a license to use drugs off target, and others will try to censor it as “misinformation.” But the benefits would be enormous. How many other medical breakthroughs have we missed due to barriers to sharing this knowledge? Patients discover them all the time: a patient takes an antibiotic and discovers that their migraines have disappeared. They tell their doctor and the doctor ignores them—or ridicules the idea as “psychogenic.”

It seems strange that if a drug kills a patient, we're required to report it, but if it cures their cancer nobody mentions it. The information is often dismissed as “merely anecdotal”—or worse, “misinformation” because it's not in the textbooks.

When basic researchers get that “how in the world am I going to explain that” moment, it's a cause for celebration. It's nature's way of handing them a free discovery. We should celebrate even more when it happens in a drug trial.

may 20 2022, 5:02 am