Doxycycline in Cancer, Rosacea, Bioterror Attacks, Alzheimer's & Prion Disease

Sub-antibiotic Doses May Work Without Disrupting the Microbiome

Doxycycline Can Treat Anthrax & Plague that May be Spread in Bioterror Attacks

Ivermectin, Fenbendazole, and Metformin are not the only repurposed drugs that can prevent or suppress cancer metastases. Other drugs, like Doxycycline, also target cancer stem cell populations and can help prevent spread and tumor recurrence. As we know too well, tumor recurrence following cancer treatment is the main cause of cancer death.

Today, I feature Doxycycline as a powerful repurposed drug that can prevent this and consequently help one survive cancer, regardless of stage. It may also help one survive a bioterror attack, as the above screen view from PubMed certifies. But first, let us review how it functions well against many other diseases.

Like Ivermectin, Doxycycline is not only effective against bacteria but can be used to fight inflammatory conditions like Rosacea and Cancer. And like Ivermectin, Doxycycline is anti-parasitic, anti-viral and neuroprotective. But the anti-bioterror aspects of Doxy are timely.

Perhaps we should add a third category of disease, those “by design, or for bioterror.” Doxycycline has activity against this category of diseases that include Plague, Anthrax, Lyme Disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, SARS CoV-2, and you fill in the blank. Thus, if you are concerned about bioterror, Doxycycline should be in your medicine chest. With a GoodRx coupon, 14 of the 100mg tablets cost less than one dollar each.

Doxycycline was approved to treat Pustular Rosacea in 2006, and the drug Oracea was marketed as an SDD, a Subantibiotic dosage drug that could be taken in small amounts daily for up to 40 weeks to prevent recurrence. The dose of 40mg/day is too low to be antimicrobial; however, it is sufficient to allow its anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activity to act via its matrix metalloproteinases.

The biggest argument against long-term Doxycycline use had been concern about the gut flora. But in low doses, even for many months, this is not an issue.

Interestingly, and again in parallel with Ivermectin, long-term use of low-dose Doxycycline is not associated with gut microbiome harm but, in some cases, with protection.

For example, in long-term Malaria prophylaxis in deployed troops, the microbiome was preserved even in soldiers on 20mg/day for nine months. On the other hand, researchers saw disruption of the microbiome in doses equivalent to 200mg/day given to broiler chickens.

However, the health benefits of Doxycycline were remarkable against a variety of gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria, including Pneumonia, Chlamydia, Cholera, Typhus, Yersinia Pestis [black plague], and Syphilis. It is also used to prevent Malaria.

It is useful against Tularemia, Brucella, and Rickettsia.

Interestingly its SDD effectiveness against Pustular Rosacea stems more from its anti-inflammatory activity than its anti-microbial action.

Doxycycline’s neuroprotective activity is astonishing. It has robust potential to help patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s Chorea, and even Jacob Creutzfeldt Disease.

In a study of 100 patients with mild to moderate dementia, 12 weeks of Doxycycline 200mg/day and Rifampin 300mg/day were administered. Compared to the controls, the treated group showed significantly less cognitive decline.

Balducci and colleagues have studied the benefits of tetracyclines in general and Doxycycline in particular against Alzheimer’s disease. They found that Doxycycline has powerful anti-amyloid activity and opposes neuroinflammation. It unfolds pathological proteins, and it neutralizes inflammatory molecules.

Since it also crosses the blood-brain barrier, it not only slows or opposes Alzheimer’s, but mouse studies have demonstrated improvements in memory with its use.

Doxycycline seems to have a beneficial effect in diseases with misfolded proteins, helping unwind them and often binding these neuro-inflammatory proteins into inert compounds. Thus, Doxycycline has shown benefits in many neurological diseases, including Huntington’s and Parkinson’s.

Doxycycline can even potentially treat incurable conditions such as prion disease. In a study of patients with Jacob Creutzfeldt Disease [CJD], the group receiving Doxycycline survived an average of 346 days compared to 208 days in the control group.

When we reach Doxycycline’s activity against cancer, we are again impressed that it is one of the few drugs that suppress cancer stem cells from growing and spreading. Like Ivermectin, Doxycycline powerfully suppresses metastases, and one mechanism is by opposing the action of matrix metalloproteinases.

These proteinases break down the extracellular matrix, allowing cancer cells to freely flow throughout the body. Doxycycline can inhibit this and the ability of cancer cells to migrate, resulting in less metastatic spread.

Dr. Paul E. Marik, in his classic repurposed drug reference book, Cancer Care - now in print on Amazon Kindle - explained it this way:

“Doxycycline blocks the activity of metalloproteinases, which would otherwise be involved in the breakdown of the extracellular matrix that allows individual cancer cells to break free and seed new metastatic cancer growth around the body. Considering the potent inhibitory effects of tetracyclines against metalloproteinases, their anticancer potential has been studied in a variety of cancers, including melanoma, lung, breast, and prostate cancers.”

In addition, Doxycycline is anti-angiogenic, and it directly acts upon the mitochondria.

For all of these reasons, it is an excellent repurposed cancer drug. Most published peer-reviewed literature shows Doxycycline to be relatively safe with many health-promoting properties.

One study stands out as a potential negative and is a rat study where the rodents were given cancer by high doses of dimethyl hydrazine, an ingredient of rocket fuel, a DNA alkylating agent that is highly carcinogenic. The agent can produce cancer quickly, or it can follow after a latency of years.

In any case, the researchers produced colon cancer in the rats and then followed this with Doxycycline at dosages per weight almost 20 to 50 times those advised in humans. Not surprisingly, they found increasing colon inflammation and metastases in those with the most extreme doses. Mixing dimethyl hydrazine with Doxycycline and blaming the worsening cancers on the Doxycycline is absurd.

This isolated study cannot be taken to suggest that Doxycycline will do this in humans at normal to low doses without dimethyl hydrazine.

However, perhaps this study captured exactly why Doxycycline at extremely high doses provoked inflammation while the lower doses recommended in humans do not.

In a 2015 cell-culture study, Di Caprio and a group of Italian researchers found that Doxycycline did not produce bacterial resistance or flora alterations at low doses—20 to 40mg/day.

At higher doses, with pretreatment with LPS—lipid polysaccharide—insult, they noticed less modulation of IL-8, TNF-alpha, and IL-6 gene expression. That is to say, low doses of Doxycycline were more effective than high doses in their anti-inflammation effect.

A 2019 Polish Study led by Markowska discussed the need to repurpose antibiotic drugs like Ivermectin and Doxycycline in concert with traditional chemotherapeutic agents as they work via different pathways, and these antibiotics could suppress metastasis and cancer stem cells, even at very low and infrequent dosing.

Just as low-dose Doxy can work wonders in the long term to prevent the recurrence of Rosacea, it may be the same in its benefit in preventing or suppressing diseases like Malaria, Cancer, CJD, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinsonism.

In addition, taking 100 mg of Doxycycline daily can reduce one’s risk of contracting traveler’s diarrhea by up to 50%.

But back to cancer. Doxycycline radio sensitizes cancer cells, making them nearly five times more vulnerable to conventional radiation treatment. This is a great argument to suggest to all your friends the benefits of pre-medicating with Doxycycline before their radiation.

It further sensitizes cells to the effects of chemotherapy to effectively suppress resistance, especially in the case of Temozolomide use in Glioblastoma. One of the main reasons patients die from Glioblastoma with conventional treatment is resistance to Temozolomide. Thus, adding Doxycycline to Glioblastoma [GBM] should prolong survival, and it does, as the Metrics Trial showed - to the tune of more than doubling it.

In Metrics, GBM patients were given the four-drug patented Care Oncology Clinic Cocktail of Metformin, Doxycycline, Mebendazole, and Atorvastatin, with a resulting survival of about 27 months, compared to the normal survival of about 12 to 15 months.

But Doxycycline’s anti-cancer activity is every bit as impressive as that of Ivermectin, and its anti-cancer stem cell properties make this all the more logical.

Both Ivermectin and Doxycycline target cancer stem cells which are essentially the “seeds” of cancer. By suppressing these cancer stem cell populations, one can prevent or suppress metastasis, and thereby potentially prevent a cancer from returning once it has been eradicated with traditional or non-traditional treatment.

Cancer stem cells are controlled with three main signaling pathways, the Hedgehog, the WNT, and the Notch. Doxy targets cancer stem cells through all three of these key pathways.

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