Medical musings: Ivermectin from parasites, to cancer to SARS-CoV-2

If you're a doctor just read the actual paper to save time, I'm musing things below.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011

History of the drug's development for anti-parasitic human use:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043740

[Despite being around since 1970 for people, folks were still not really sure how it works in 2011 but hypothesize it drives parasites deeper making it easier for the body's immune system to reach and handle them.]

.....

If you read enough about medicine (Western and some traditional Eastern + indigenous), eventually you learn:

1) A lot of commercial drug names "Lopinavir", "Duranovir" look like they came straight outta Lord of the Rings

2) There are common pharmaceutical strategies for halting/killing an illness; complex treatments tend to combine some of them:

I. halt the spread until it can't reproduce any more thus die off [most anti-fungal cremes like for athlete's foot];

II. make it easier for white blood cells to find and eat the offender [vaccines]

III. directly break/puncture the offending/intruding/infecting thing [emerging research for turmeric, lemon grass oils, etc.];

IV. create a bad environment for it (and sometimes everything else) [i.e. dietary restrictions for fungal infections; eating bitter squash/melon regularly as an anti-parasitic treatment]

3) The pharmaceutical industry will spend a lot on one drug, wants to find as many uses for the same medication as possible, and sometimes spend a lot more to market its uses elsewhere, literally by trying to selling their drugs to doctors

i.e. heart medicines turned into viagara-like recreational medicines or in this case, anti-parasitic medication tested for treatment against viral infections (and maybe cancer in a different study I've yet to find)

4) sometimes #3 limits research for taking different approaches to solving the problem, so some researchers need to also make the business case for what they're studying and why it matters, and you've got to watch with some skepticism

5) science and the medical systems focus on systems + how things happen without necessarily heeding the who that makes humanity and personal stories important to understand

I'm no pharmacist or doctor. So here's an armchair analysis that could be really wrong:

Ivermectin is sometimes used for removing parasites de-worming dogs and horses, but among people it's been effective and also pretty safe and easy to apply for similar purposes.

In more recent research, it's suspected to slow or stop the growth/reproduction of cells. An online forum anecdote with obscure research reference (I've yet to find the paper) from a few years ago apparently suggests that it also stops some forms of cancer from developing.

So if it's effective against a virus like COVID-19, the idea is that it probably reduces the number of vulnerable cells from replicating -- thus there are fewer cells for the virus to hijack and infect/multiply off of.

As a treatment that inhibits cell reproduction, it probably depends on how soon it's used for it to be effective.

I suspect early on it could be useful: sounds like the medication acts like a "stay at home"/social distancing order by slowing down the exposure of how many cells are vulnerable to getting hijacked by the virus and therefore spreading infection/reproducing more viral RNA.

But like some peoples' concerns, there's probably a very delicate and critical tipping point on how advanced the infection might get where eventually the body's everything else would be too weakened/compromised for it to be helpful.

For the sake of playing out the existing current event metaphor:

That's like forcing a stay-at-home when folks are already infected and need medical care but the health care providers are already sick too.