Rick Alderson was a retired sawmill worker who was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer in November 2020.
He experienced excruciating pain in his bowels for months; then, a gastroenterologist found a large tumor in his rectum and told him and his wife that he only had six months to live.
To the oncologist, Mr. Alderson “was a dead man walking,” Mr. Alderson’s wife, Eve Alderson, told The Epoch Times.
Doctors were against starting him on treatment because of Mr. Alderson’s age and the severity of his cancer, but Mr. and Mrs. Alderson determined that their fate was in God’s hands and decided to do whatever they could.
Mr. Alderson got started with 10 rounds of radiation therapy. Initially, his carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), a marker for tumor activity, was significantly elevated at 480 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL). A month later, he started chemotherapy. By then, his CEA levels had risen to 1,498 ng/mL.
By the time he started treatment, his colon cancer had metastasized and spread to his liver, where he had 25 tumors.
“I was off their charts,” Mr. Alderson said in an interview with The Cancer Box, a cancer diagnosis blog.
Due to concerns about COVID-19 and the ongoing pandemic, he started looking into preventive medication and found ivermectin.
Further research showed that the drug could likely enhance the effectiveness of his chemotherapy and radiation therapy and was relatively safe. In February 2021, he began taking ivermectin.
Ten days later, his CEA levels had dropped to 184 ng/mL.
Come March, the number was 47.9 ng/mL. By April 7, it was 20.7; by April 21, it had dropped to 13.9 ng/mL. By midsummer, it had fallen into the normal range. Of the 25 tumors in his liver, only three remained.
Mr. Alderson went on to live another two years before succumbing to liver failure because of the progression of his three remaining liver tumors.
“His life was definitely extended,” Mrs. Alderson said, reflecting on Mr. Alderson’s cancer journey.
Multiple Anti-Cancer Effects
“There are at least nine perfectly defined cancer targets affected by ivermectin,” Dr. Alfonso Dueñas-González, an oncologist and senior researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told The Epoch Times.
Ivermectin also enhances the effects of chemo and radiation therapy. It has a broad impact on the immune system, increasing immune offense against cancers.
It also inhibits cancer cell cycles, helping prevent the formation of new cancer cells. The drug promotes the killing of cancer cells by inducing mitochondrial stress and prevents cancer survival by preventing new blood vessels, which transport energy and fuel to cancers, from forming near cancer cells.
For two patients, ivermectin was added last in the therapeutic combination, with doctors observing significant improvements in symptoms. Soon after ivermectin was added, “all the symptoms were relieved,” the authors noted about one patient.
An Immune Booster
Dr. Peter P. Lee, chair of immuno-oncology at the City of Hope, is a leading researcher in the United States on ivermectin as an immunotherapeutic drug for cancer.Conventional anti-cancer therapeutics, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy, focus on damaging the DNA of cancer cells and killing them. At the same time, the treatments also kill immune cells and suppress the immune system.
“Ivermectin can kill cancer cells in a way that drives the host immune response—what we call immunogenic cell death (ICD),” Dr. Lee said.
“Genuinely speaking, patients with hot tumors have better clinical outcomes with a lower risk for recurrence and live longer, so there’s a lot of interest in what regulates whether tumors are hot or cold,” Dr. Lee said.
However, tumors continued to grow in mice given ivermectin alone, meaning that the drug is not enough by itself. Dr. Lee reasoned that ivermectin could synergize with immune checkpoint inhibitor anti-PD1, an immunotherapy drug. Immunotherapy is a relatively new form of anti-cancer therapy that strengthens the body’s immune system to fight cancer. While some immunotherapies have broad immune-strengthening effects, the most commonly used ones target only a specific subset of the immune system.
After they were once again injected with cancer cells, the mice whose tumors were cleared after this combination therapy no longer formed new tumors.
However, only ivermectin and pembrolizumab together could completely clear out metastasis.
“Ivermectin has a lot of promise for cancer but probably not as a stand-alone treatment,” Dr. Lee said.
New Therapeutic Reality?
Dr. Lee’s team has begun a clinical trial of ivermectin combined with immunotherapy for women with metastatic breast cancer. They have also found ivermectin to be effective against other types of cancer cells. Therefore, additional patients may be included in future trials.The interaction of the two therapies is a highly complex process dependent on timing, dosage, and drug combinations.
Dr. Lee likened the process of using multiple drugs to boost immunity to coaching a football team.
“You don’t just throw all the players together and say, ‘Just run.’ You have different people doing different things. You have different sequences to try to score,” he said.
“What we’re learning is that ivermectin is going to be a very powerful drug in the context of really carefully developed immunotherapy combinations.”
Dr. Kathleen Ruddy, a Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center-trained breast cancer surgeon, also became interested in ivermectin after three patients she consulted with experienced a dramatic improvement in their condition after taking it with other adjunctive therapeutics.
The first of the three patients had stage 4 prostate cancer. It came on abruptly, and after exhausting all possible treatments within nine months, his doctors announced that he had three weeks left to live. The patient started taking ivermectin along with other nutraceuticals, and within two months, his prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a potential marker for prostate tumor, became negligible. Within six months, the metastatic lesions had begun to disappear, and in less than a year, “he was out dancing for four hours” three nights per week, according to Dr. Ruddy.
The same scenario unfolded for two subsequent patients.
“I’ve been a cancer surgeon for over 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this in one patient—let alone three in a row,” she said.
Dr. Ruddy is currently recruiting for an observational study on the effects of alternative cancer treatments. As it is an observational study, patients have complete control over the therapeutics they want to be on, and researchers will only follow them for the duration of their prognosis.
Some doctors have already been treating cancer using ivermectin—with some success.
Dr. Dueñas-González has prescribed ivermectin at his private clinic. Most of his patients also received chemotherapy treatments, and some saw reductions in their tumor marks after going on ivermectin.
Responsive Cancer Types
Ivermectin has shown some degree of anti-cancer effect in every cancer type it has been tested on, Dr. Ruddy said.
Its use in some cancer types is more well-researched than others, although most of the research has not been conducted in humans but in human cell lines or animals.
