Fenbendazole is a broad-spectrum, inexpensive, antiparasitic medication used in veterinary medicine for intestinal parasites such as roundworms, hookworms, lungworms, flukes, and Giardia. It has been in wide use as a deworming agent for nearly 20 years and is often prescribed as part of a monthly heartworm preventative regimen. It is also effective against parasites that cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis, echinococcosis, and giardiasis.
It is known to have minimal side effects in most animals when given at regular doses and at a low rate of administration. It is important to remember that if your pet experiences any side effects of this drug, they should be reported to your veterinarian immediately. These include facial swelling, itchiness, hives, salivation, vomiting, diarrhea, seizures, and shock.
The benzimidazole carbamate antiparasitic drugs in the BZ family, to which fenbendazole belongs, have been safely in veterinary and human clinical use for over six decades. The three members of this group, fenbendazole (FenBen), mebendazole (Meben) and albendazole (Alben), are among the most widely prescribed medications in the world.
These drugs have been shown to be effective against a variety of helminth infections, including whipworms and tapeworms, and they are generally well-tolerated by patients. In fact, fenbendazole is so safe that it can be used in infants with no effect on their growth and development.
A few weeks ago, a Canadian veterinarian named Andrew Jones posted videos on Facebook and TikTok that claimed that the deworming medicine he had administered to a dog had cured his small-cell lung cancer. The video has since gone viral, and Jones has been reprimanded by the College of Veterinarians of British Columbia for his claims.
To examine whether fenbendazole could act as a radiosensitizer in tumor cells, cultures of exponentially growing EMT6 cells were treated with varying concentrations of fenbendazole for 2 or 24 h, and assayed for cell survival using a colony formation assay. The results are shown in Figure 1, and they were compared with the viability of untreated cultures and the yield-corrected surviving fractions from control cultures.
The results show that fenbendazole did not significantly alter the radiation response of aerobic and hypoxic EMT6 cells. This was true whether the drug was added to the culture a few seconds before radiation treatment or 22 h before the 2-h exposure. The data from these experiments, together with the time to four-fold volume data for irradiated tumors in the previous experiment, show that fenbendazole has no significant impact on radiation-dose-response curves for EMT6 cells.
Our findings provide no evidence that fenbendazole has any role to play in the radiosensitization of tumors and are consistent with the lack of a similar effect by other hypoxia-selective, nitroheterocyclic cytotoxics and radiosensitizers. These results, however, should not discourage researchers from exploring the potential of this compound as an anticancer agent. fenbendazole capsules
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