Is Fenbendazole Effective As a Cancer Treatment?

While there are some studies showing that fenbendazole can slow cancer cells in cell culture and in animals, it’s not clear whether it’s actually effective as a cancer treatment. There are also no human clinical trials that show if it works or not, so it’s impossible to say for sure.

A specialist cancer information nurse for Cancer Research UK told Full Fact there is no evidence that fenbendazole cures cancer, and it would need to go through proper clinical trials before being used in patients. She also said that it wouldn’t be a good idea for people to stop taking their existing treatments in order to try it out.

This is a study that looked at the effect of fenbendazole on irradiated tumors in mice. It involved a series of experiments where tumor-bearing mice were randomly assigned to a control group, a fenbendazole-only group, or a fenbendazole plus radiation group. Then the times it took for each of these groups to grow their tumors from their initial volume to four-times that volume were measured. These results were compared to each other and to the time it took for untreated controls to reach four-times their initial volume.

In this experiment, fenbendazole was found to inhibit tubulin polymerization. This prevents the assembly of mitotic spindles which is necessary for cell division. It was also found that fenbendazole had time-dependent antiproliferative effects on both SNU-C5/5 and SNU-C5/5-FUR colorectal carcinoma cells. These effects were associated with an early increase in cyclin B1/CDK1 levels, which is the step before mitosis. fenbendazole cancer treatment