I don't know that I would call en vitro studies promising. Cancer would be long be a solved problem if even a tenth of the stuff that kills cancer cells in a petri dish was viable in humans.
Sure, there's a few. But 3 rodent studies isn't exactly enough evidence for a layperson to worry about, either. It's not even much of a signal for scientists in that area of research.
Ivermectin is pretty safe for people to use regardless of whether or not they have parasites, so sure, do the human RCTs. Maybe we'll get lucky and have another tool in our anti-cancer toolbox.
But trying to extrapolate out that it's reasonable for people to take it for cancer based on the current evidence is premature, at best.
They are a required step along the way to human trials.
But over 90% of drugs that show promise in rodents flunk out in human trials.
Something working in rodents is an indicator that it might be worth doing testing to see if it works and is safe for humans. But if you bet against it panning out, you'd still be right the overwhelming majority of the time.
The only thing you can project from rodent trial success is that it is worth continuing to study. It should not guide any human usage at that point.
No. It's still absurd to project human outcomes from rodent studies.
90-95% of them don't pan out! And that's of the ones that progress from rodent studies to human trials. The actual number is even higher, but more difficult to track.
Surely you can see how it would be absurd to extrapolate success from something with, at best, a 5-10% chance of panning out? And panning out as in being approved - lots of things that are approved have less than 100% success rate, particularly in this area.
During peak covid-19 I read a lot of ivermectin studies posted in HN. Most were just horrible, with obvious mistakes. If you pick one, I can give a try to roast it.
My personal quick rubric for determining if an ivermectin study showing improvement for cv19 outcomes is likely to be trustworthy:
Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?
Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid
No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.
I remember a preprint. I think it was comparing the recorery rate of
a) Ivermectin in the best hospital in the capital city of one of our most poor provinces in Argentina
b) The average in the same poor province
I don't expect too many problems with parasites there. They implicitly decided that the difference was ivermectin, not that the hospital is probably x10 better than the average of the province.
Doble blind randomized controlled group or it didn't happen.
> Complete tumor regression was observed in 6/15 mice on the combination treatment, 1/20 on ivermectin alone, 1/10 on anti-PD1 antibody alone, and 0/25 on no treatment.
As I mentioned above (another comment), pharma tends to avoid developing applications for generic/cheap drugs so we may not see more research on this front. Who knows.
If there is a x5 improvement they will get a method to package both drugs together and sell them for x10 the price. You surely want a profesional mix in the high tech lab instead of a random guy mixing tubes in the back room. Another trick is to add something to the molecule like a methyl -CH3, show that the new version is 10% even better and charge x20 for it.
So my guess is that there is some problem to use this mix, but as I said I can't find any obvious error and it's really interesting. I'd love to read a better analysis from someone that is an expert in the area.
