Ivermectin might be a valid treatment for cancer

It's possible, but is it knowable?

There is enough preliminary evidence that we should urgently run proper trials. Yet we haven’t. When I raise this, a question immediately burns: “Why would you know something the doctors don’t? If it worked, they’d already be using it!”

The scale of any such error would be enormous. Ivermectin is cheap, safe, and widely available. So the idea that it could help treat cancer feels almost impossible — because if true, it would mean a substantial part of our medical culture doesn’t make sense.

This is not medical advice. Do not stop standard cancer treatment or self-medicate with ivermectin. Always talk to your oncologist.

Just consider Cancer Research UK alone. Think of all the wonderful people who’ve run marathons and charity events to raise money for them. They have an annual budget of £750 million, and you’re telling me they haven’t noticed there’s viable candidate for treating cancer that is cheap and already sitting in the pharmacy?

Yes. That’s what I’m telling you. I’m going to explain how this happens as directly as I can, because to understand this, is to understand the structural failure of modern medicine. Please be aware, this is not medical advice. Do not stop standard cancer treatment or self-medicate with ivermectin. Talk to your oncologist.

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On the first issue, why would you know something the doctors don’t!? This is an unhelpful model to use to address the proposition. I don’t “know something others don’t”, because doctors do know that Ivermectin might be an effective treatment for cancer. In fact, the only reason I know is because there are many doctors who’ve already researched it, tried it and then published their findings. I just happen to have been researching and writing about Ivermectin, and so I came across the material. There’s nothing special about me.

At this junction, if you think I am making it up as some weird grift, I don’t really blame you. So let’s dive into the literature and shore it up. Here’s a collection of published research where Ivermectin has been used as a treatment for cancer either in real patients or in laboratory experiments. Because this can get heavy going, I’ve translated the study titles and results into something everyone can understand.

1. Testing If Ivermectin Can Help the Immune System Fight Breast Cancer in Mice and Lab Cells The researchers tested ivermectin on mouse breast cancer models to see if it could make tumors more recognizable to the immune system (turning “cold” tumors “hot”). They found that the drug successfully triggered cancer cell death and helped immune cells infiltrate the tumors, especially when combined with other immune-boosting drugs.

2. Using Ivermectin to Stop Skin Cancer from Spreading to the Lungs in Mice Researchers wanted to see if ivermectin could prevent melanoma (a deadly skin cancer) from spreading to the lungs using mouse models and cell cultures. They found that the drug effectively blocked the cancer from spreading by stopping the formation of specific cellular “traps” that tumors use to travel through the body.

3. Testing How Ivermectin Blocks Growth Signals in Human Cancer Cells and Mice This laboratory study looked at how ivermectin interferes with specific growth signals that cancer cells rely on to multiply. The researchers showed that the drug successfully blocked these signals, stopping cancer cell growth in test tubes and shrinking tumors in living mice without causing significant side effects.

4. Using Ivermectin to Make Chemotherapy Work Better on Resistant Cancer Cells Scientists tested if adding ivermectin could help standard cancer drugs work on cancer cells that had developed a resistance to chemotherapy. They discovered that ivermectin successfully reversed the cancer’s drug resistance by shutting down the chemical pathways the cells use to pump out the chemotherapy.

5. Tracking Real-World Cancer Patients Who Took Ivermectin and Mebendazole Instead of a laboratory experiment, researchers observed 197 actual cancer patients who chose to take ivermectin and mebendazole off-label over a six-month period. They tracked the patients’ self-reported outcomes, safety data, and adherence to understand how these repurposed drugs affect real humans undergoing cancer treatment.

6. Exploring How Ivermectin Stops Colon and Breast Cancers from Spreading This study used both lab-grown cells and living mice to figure out exactly how ivermectin stops breast and colon cancers from moving to other parts of the body. They found that the drug successfully paralyzed the cancer cells by blocking the specific chemical signals they use to crawl and spread.

7. Testing Ivermectin Against Blood Cancer Cells in the Lab This laboratory experiment investigated whether ivermectin could destroy lymphoma (a type of blood cancer) cells. The researchers found that the drug effectively halted the cancer cells’ growth cycle and destroyed their energy centers, forcing the cells to die off.

8. Mixing Ivermectin with a Special Enzyme to Kill Pancreatic Cancer Cells Scientists tested if ivermectin could be combined with a specific enzyme (rMETase) to destroy hard-to-treat pancreatic cancer cells in a petri dish. They found that while ivermectin alone killed nearly half the cells, the combination of both wiped out 80% of the cancer cells.

9. A Massive Review of All Existing Data on Ivermectin as a Cancer Drug Rather than running a new experiment, researchers gathered and analyzed all the existing lab, animal, and human trial data regarding ivermectin’s effect on cancer. The review confirmed broad evidence that the drug stops tumor growth and reverses drug resistance, while noting that early-stage human clinical trials are actively underway.

Surprised?

For people trained in medical science or medical literature, many will be frothing with rage at what I’ve just suggested by sharing this list without qualifying context. Before we address their concerns, let’s focus our attention on how a normal person will respond to a list like this.

In the very least, this is a very promising set of data. Ivermectin has been in use since 1987, it is amongst the most prescribed medicine in history, it has an impeccable safety record. Satoshi Ōmura won the Nobel Prize for its discovery. What’s more, the drug is now generic, meaning it costs almost nothing to manufacture. Look at all these great results researchers have had using it to either kill cancer cells, stop cancer growth, or treat patients directly. It’s great right?

Well no. Not at all.

To the people who are currently raging at me, they’re upset that I’ve suggested the drug might work without citing a clinical trial. What they’ll say, quite indignantly, is that “this is not clinical data! These are in-vitro studies, or small scale self-reported data with no controls, and you can’t infer effectiveness from this dataset!” Those people are right by the way.

So what’s going on exactly?

Go and type into Google “ivermectin as a treatment for cancer” and you’ll soon (very likely) be looking at the consensus view of an industry dominated by the pharmaceutical industry. The top result (in the UK) will be MacMillan Cancer Support where Richard Simcock, the Chief Medical Officer, gives this rather precise qualification, “Ivermectin is an effective drug in the treatment of parasitic infections. However, there is currently zero real-world clinical evidence that it might be helpful in the treatment of cancer.”

Here’s the kicker, he’s absolutely correct. But to a normal person, this sounds like “see! It doesn’t work!”, and I’m here to chart a third path. It does not mean the drug doesn’t work, it means we haven’t properly tested it.

You see, the people who react with rage to my list of small studies on Ivermectin are the dominant voices in medicine. Their view, which I accept is “the correct one”, is the consensus. What they like to remind everyone of, all the time, is that we can only know if the drug works if there is a large scale Randomized Control Trial. But this is where the consensus view runs out of runway. It reveals itself not as science, but as mantra because there’s a very simple response to this assertion:

“Given the substantial body of evidence that we have, why do we not have randomized control trial data on the effectiveness of Ivermectin as a treatment for cancer?”

This is a thorny question. If they’re honest with you, they’ll have to wrestle with the incentives catastrophe at the heart of modern medicine. If they’re not, they might say the data isn’t good enough to justify a trial.

After at least sixteen years of promising data on this widely available, cheap, and safe drug’s effectiveness as a treatment for cancer, the whole cancer research establishment hasn’t run a single trial. These people genuinely wonder why trust in the medical establishment has collapsed. They think the trust was shattered by some external force, rather than the terrible incentives that sit at the heart of modern medicine. As we’ve already noted, Cancer Research UK alone has a £750 million budget, how and why didn’t they run a trial yet?

The answer is very simple, and the government is already well aware of it. A 2005 UK Government report spells it out, “The industry affects every level of healthcare provision, from the drugs that are initially discovered and developed through clinical trials, to the promotion of drugs to the prescriber and the patient groups, to the prescription of medicines and the compilation of clinical guidelines.”

The industry controls everything. So do you think they’re going to foot the bill to push a drug they can’t profit from into their own profitable market? Here is where the tension sits: if a repurposed generic drug is actually an effective therapy for cancer, the medical system is structurally incapable of making use of it.

Read that again, then let’s consider an example.

The most common cancer for men in the UK is prostate cancer. Assuming the 2005 report remains true (it is true), it’s actually the pharmaceutical industry which creates the treatment regimens for that particular illness. The approved treatment guidelines prescribe Goserelin (Zoladex), which is £940 a year. The patent for the drug is owned by AstraZeneca. You’d possibly also receive Enzalutamide, which is somewhere around £35,000 for the year, and the patent is owned by Astellas. NICE themselves list the price in their recommendation literature, “The daily dose of enzalutamide is 160 mg and costs £97.67 per day.”

You will also probably be prescribed some cheaper generic drugs too, like Docetaxel. However, because it’s IV administered (an ‘inpatient’ treatment), there are other drug paraphernalia and administration costs which can stack up to perhaps £1,500 to £3,500 a year. All things said and done, the value (ugh) “per patient” is somewhere around £40,000.

In the UK alone, cancer is projected to add £14.4 billion per year to health spending by 2050. Current direct costs are already in the region of £9–12 billion annually. Globally, spending on cancer medicines hit $252 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $441 billion by 2029.

In a market this size, the economic incentive to protect high-margin patented drugs — and the corresponding lack of urgency around cheap generics — becomes brutally obvious.

If you imagine the healthcare industry as more human aligned than any other industry, then perhaps you’d imagine incentives that relentlessly drive drug discovery. Unfortunately, the medical industry is no more aligned than any other market, and it’s the internal incentives that drive the outcomes. There’s zero incentive - none at all - to relitigate generic drugs as potential treatments for cancer. When you think about it, the incentives actually mean companies will campaign against any generic drug that looks promising, because if it turns out to work, then their $250 billion market gets a haircut.

I want you to really understand what these dynamics mean for our ability to ‘know’ which medicines are effective. So consider this: according to the FDA alone, there are 32,000 generic drugs already approved for use in humans. These are drugs which got onto the market because they were effective at something, but their patent expired, making them incredibly cheap and difficult to profit from. Globally, you could throw tens of thousands more drugs onto this pile. The incentive to investigate their effectiveness against diseases treated with expensive and patented drugs is close to zero. There might already be multiple wonderdrugs in our huge repository of useful generic drugs, but our medical system can never come ‘to know’.

Even if the drug looked promising in small scale trials, some boffin from Imperial College or a charity would warn the public against using it because “there’s no clinical data to support its use”. Whilst this might be true, as I’ve demonstrated, this hardly paints the full picture. Statements like this are an artefact of the incentives that drive medical research.

Then consider the range of non-patentable herbs, plants, fungi and bacteria which can affect the body. Can cannabis affect the body? Can mushrooms affect the body? Of course they can, but none of these natural products can be patented, so there’s simply no pathway for them to become treatments. It’s really that simple.

Pharmaceutical companies can’t ‘own’ a liberty cap mushroom, so it can’t become a treatment. Pharmaceutical companies can’t own Vitamin C, so it has no pathway to become a treatment. The list of natural “un-ownable” compounds which affect the body is absolutely massive. In Chinese Medicine there are at least 11,000 herb plants with documented medical uses, almost none of them will be patentable. One database of traditional Chinese medicine has 29,000 ingredients listed. If you throw in ancient Ayurveda, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of natural compounds, already known about, which sit beyond the reach of pharmaceutical patent lawyers, and therefore beyond the reach of hospital bedsides.

The modern search for medicine has access to an incredible modern Library of Alexandria, but restricts its search only to the compounds synthesized that year because it fears any answer which might arrive from the public domain.

Once you see the incentives baked into the system, it becomes clear why we still don’t “know” whether ivermectin works for cancer. The industry has effectively defined the boundary between “knowing” and “not knowing.” Until a drug passes through the expensive, patented-friendly randomised controlled trial pipeline they dominate, it remains in limbo — officially “unproven,” regardless of how much preliminary evidence exists.

This is not necessarily a conspiracy. It is simply what happens when profit is the dominant incentive.

The kayfabe continues. Good doctors do their best with the tools they’re given. Researchers diligently hunt for new molecules. Cancer charities raise hundreds of millions and rightly celebrate incremental progress. And patients are left navigating a system that is simultaneously miraculous and structurally blind to cheap, unownable solutions.

What does this mean for you and me?

It means we must learn to stand humbly in the unknown. We should acknowledge that what we are allowed to “know” in medicine is shaped by a highly filtered corpus of knowledge — one optimised for patentability and profitability as much as for truth.

The quiet revolution begins when ordinary people reclaim the right to ask simple, dangerous questions:

“If there’s a cheap, safe, generic drug with promising signals against cancer, why haven’t we properly tested it?”

Asking that question honestly is the first step toward restoring trust — not in institutions, but in our own capacity to reason clearly about what is known, what is unknown, and what incentives quietly shape the difference.