An Injection for Canine Cancer Holds Promise for People
Dogs treated with a chlorine dioxide shot may make history.
This is Part 2 of a series on chlorine dioxide by Mary Beth Pfeiffer. You can read Part 1 here.
Dr. Teresa Carr, a central California veterinarian, had been intrigued by the healing potential of a safe substance that killed pathogens by the score but had been all but banned as a human and animal treatment.
So she researched the safety of, and treatment protocols for, chlorine dioxide, which she discovered in a video by Dr. Lee Merritt, a self-described “Medical Rebel.” Carr, like other practitioners I have interviewed, was her first patient to use this underground, not FDA-approved, antidote. She worked up from one drop, then, after a week, to six drops in a slowly sipped quart of water. After two months of daily doses, Carr came to two conclusions.
First—and the reason she was testing on herself—she had suffered no ill effects from chlorine dioxide, which is used worldwide as a sanitizer and water purifier, and in self-care products ranging from nasal care to toe fungus treatment. But, even more intriguingly, she realized, “I’m not having my gut issues any longer,” she said. Her lactose intolerance was gone.
Carr was ready to use what NASA called “the universal antidote,” an oxidizing substance loosely related to ozone and hyperbaric oxygen therapy (but better and not nearly as costly) that robs pathogens of electrons, dooming them.
That’s when she met Maya, a fourteen-year-old, “extremely sweet” golden retriever with a painful fluid-filled mammary tumor that she was licking incessantly. Carr drained the mass several times, until Maya’s owner said she was considering euthanasia.
Carr, a vet for thirty years, proposed a “last straw” treatment: “Would you be willing for me to inject the tumor with a product that might help?”
With that invitation, a new door may have opened for chlorine dioxide, which has been reported in a handful of human case studies, and discussed in online chats, as an effective cancer treatment.
Carr’s results suggest that CD may have a serious place in veterinary medicine—and possibly beyond.
‘No more pain’
Every two weeks for eight months, Maya’s tumor was injected with a solution containing chlorine dioxide that Carr prepared. She watched the tumor shrink from the size of a small football to a lemon with “no more pain, no more swelling, no more fluid buildup.”
Maya lived another nine happy months, for which her owner was grateful. “She didn’t die of her mammary tumor,” Carr said. She was simply unable to walk.
If Maya had been given traditional chemotherapy, she would have endured the associated discomfort, nausea, and other side effects. She had none with chlorine dioxide. Besides this, her grateful owner was spared another kind of pain.
Maya’s chlorine dioxide treatment was $720 for six months; Carr estimates chemotherapy would have cost $6,000.
Carr injected two more dogs with the do-it-yourself chlorine dioxide preparation she had used successfully with Maya. She shrunk the tumor of a big dog named Piper and gave extra months of life to a tiny, elderly one, Cinnamon, as you’ll read below. Carr had only just begun her journey as a canine cancer pioneer.
‘Effectively eliminated’
Soon after starting Maya’s treatments, Carr went to a conference in Florida where she met Valerie Alliger-Bograd, the daughter of the late Howard Alliger, who in 2018 had patented a ready-made injection of chlorine dioxide to treat cancer.
Carr had been inspired enough by Alliger’s idea to try it. And Alliger-Bograd, president of the company her father started, Frontier Pharmaceutical, Inc. was looking for a veterinarian to actually try the formulation, called INtume.
The patent—which is not specifically aimed for use in dogs—describes the product in this way: “The chlorine dioxide compositions are injected directly into the cancerous tumor and the resulting tumor is effectively eliminated from the patient or subject over a period of one to several days to a few weeks.”
For Carr, her do-it-yourself method, which required mixing the raw materials of chlorine dioxide, was about to change.
In the last two months, Carr has sent me graphic photographs of shrunken, desiccated tumors, first induced by injections of her own mixture of chlorine dioxide and then by Alliger’s more concentrated brainchild-in-a-vial.
Her first three cases before she began using INtume serve as a sort of proof-of-concept that show chlorine dioxide’s potential for cancer. Here are the other two:
Piper, a female German shepherd, eight years old, was diagnosed, like Maya, with a mammary tumor. After trying fenbendazole and immune mushrooms without any change in size, Carr injected a 3,000 parts-per-million chlorine dioxide solution into the tumor. The treatments were stopped after four months when the tumor created a contact rash on the dog’s thigh, prompting tumor removal. Black “necrotic” tissue was found inside and there was no blood supply to the tumor, Carr said. The dog survives.
Cinnamon, a female Shih Tzu, seventeen, with liver cancer, came in with the highest alanine transaminase liver enzyme—7,788—that Carr had ever seen; normal is 150. She started the ten-pound dog on low-dose chlorine dioxide enemas—having read it supports liver detoxification—along with fenbendazole. Within a week, the dog’s enzyme levels plummeted by 7,000 points and she resumed eating and activity.
“All in all, I gave the owner eight months of good quality of life with her beloved little Cinnamon,” Carr wrote in her Substack. For now, that’s what she could offer, since she does not yet inject chlorine dioxide into internal tumors like Cinnamon’s.
While Carr knew that she was on to something, her next round of treatments using Alliger’s invention would be another kind of breakthrough. One dose, given correctly, could infuse and kill tumors, unlike the dozen shots given Maya at the start of Carr’s CD expedition.
Alliger’s innovation executed
LB, a male English Springer Spaniel, fourteen, became the first dog to be injected with INtume, one of about forty chlorine dioxide innovations Alliger patented until his death in 2020. A complex case, LB—short for Little Boy—had a type of aggressive cancer, soft-tissue sarcoma, that can survive radiation or surgery and come roaring back to life. LB had already had two tumors removed from his leg. Each grew back.
Then, INtume was tried on two of three leg tumors, a learning experience for Carr. The initial treatment—which involves injecting the solution in multiple locations on the tumor—was painful to the dog and failed to saturate one tumor. A second injection was tried a month later under anesthesia. On day sixteen, the necrotized tumor fell off. The second tumor necrotized after just one shot.
Ultimately, LB died “due to other complications,” Carr said, who tells the springer’s story in a Frontier video.
Shiloh, an eight-year-old yellow Labrador retriever, came to Carr with a mast-cell tumor on his shoulder, about the size of a walnut protruding from his skin. In photographs taken six days after the INtume injection, the tumor looks flat, dry and black, akin to a large scab. Seven months later, Carr said, Shiloh “has no sign of mast-cell tumor.”
The upshot: Of the five dogs Carr treated with Alliger’s chlorine-dioxide formulation, “All five of the cases had cancerous masses resolve,” Carr said. All but LB had just a single injection.
The other three dogs were:
Marion, a pit bull, 11, with a mast-cell tumor on her chest.
Dakota, a pit bull mix, 8, with a mast-cell tumor under her chin; notably, she had been treated twice with Stelfonta, a drug that costs $2,000 to $5,000 for a single or series of injections.
Brody, a Corgie, 11, with a benign tumor that the dog was scratching.
These results prompted me to ask Carr, “So you must think that if this works on animals, it probably would work on people.”
“One hundred percent,” she replied.
From Mice to Men
As with many pharmaceuticals, INtume’s outside-the-petri-dish studies began with mice, specifically those without immune systems and in which cancer had been induced from human cells. Mice with cancer of the brain, pancreas, prostate, and colon were then treated with INtume, typically killing the tumor within twenty-four hours, according to a company presentation.
Seven dogs have been treated with INtume so far—part of a case series that will be monitored over time. They include two dogs treated by another veterinarian in Florida. More veterinarians are being sought for trial use of INtume.
“We are incredibly encouraged by our mouse and dog studies,” Valerie Alliger-Bograd, the Frontier president, told me.
Referring to dogs, she wrote in a text, “We can typically see the necrosis happening within minutes after injection. The tumor tissue eventually completely necroses and falls off, also leaving an open wound. The length of time it took for that to happen varies based on the size, type, and location of the tumor. The time to complete wound healing also varies but we have seen complete healing in every case, so far without any recurrence.”
INtume, which delivers a more concentrated chlorine dioxide solution than Carr’s, “will not be as expensive as chemotherapy,” she told me. “Likely much much less.”
Challenges ahead
In 2017, a Harvard-trained French oncologist, Laurent Schwartz of the Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Paris, published outcomes of chlorine dioxide use in two metastatic cancer cases.
In the first, a man with pancreatic cancer refused chemotherapy and himself took oral chlorine dioxide and two common supplements. Blood and other tests “have almost normalized and the disease is stable at 18 months,” Schwartz reported in the Journal of Cancer Treatment & Diagnosis. A second man, with prostate cancer, heard about the first and began a similar protocol. His metastatic pain “almost completely disappeared” and he “experienced a sharp drop in PSA level as well as improved medical condition.”
In a call from Paris, Dr. Schwartz told me he had presented before the French Senate on patients who were taking methylene blue and chlorine dioxide for advanced cancer. “They reported markedly improved results,” he said.
But he also cited impediments to chlorine dioxide—official resistance to its use in people, as well as the difficulty of taking it in small watered-down doses throughout the day. “It’s inconvenient and it smells like a swimming pool,” he said.
Of his findings, he said, “These drugs stop tumor growth, but do not cure cancer. It simply doesn’t grow as quickly, or grows at all, but does not cure.”
Schwartz’s cases took CD orally, however. Frontier’s product involves direct injection.
Dr. Paul Marik is chief medical officer for the Independent Medical Alliance and author of a book on repurposed drugs for cancer. On a thread about his new Substack, he recently answered a reader’s question on chlorine dioxide for cancer.
“Chlorine dioxide is a remarkable anti-infective agent; it kills every bug known to mankind. Great for wounds, acne, burns etc. Treats malaria. CLDO2 injected directly into cancers may be beneficial. However, I don’t think that oral CLDO2 is useful for Cancer.”
I asked him to elaborate in a phone conversation. “I’m skeptical until there’s more data,” he told me. Regarding injections, “For many tumors, the problem is you can’t get at it with a needle. It may be inaccessible or may have metastasized.”
Dr. Carr’s investigational case studies did not compare outcomes of chlorine dioxide for canine cancer to chemotherapy, surgery, or a placebo. Nor are they randomized controlled trials, which would be a step toward FDA approval but are prohibitively expensive. Frontier Pharmaceutical is looking for veterinarians—who may have used traditional treatments—to enroll new cases for the study.
Said Alliger-Bograd: “I envision that INtume will become a simple, inexpensive, non-invasive, standard of care treatment option for surface tumors in humans and animals, especially for recurrent tumors or tumors that are not candidates for surgical removal.
“Ultimately INtume may be used on internal tumors as well. That work still remains to be done.”
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The fabulous Curious Outlier sent me testimonials from people who used chlorine dioxide for cancer. https://curioushumanproductions.substack.com/p/can-chlorine-dioxide-cure-cancer
My wife and I are the happy parents of Brody the 11 year old corgi that Dr Carr treated. We were both amazed by the results. This killed the tumor and the legs that extended internally, all came out and healed over. Brody had no pain and is back to his happy go lucky self.