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Rose Bengal

Rose Bengal is a bright red dye often used to colour food. Recent research has discovered that injecting rose bengal directly into a cancerous tumour not only causes rapid shrinkage of the tumour, but also causes other tumours of the same type elsewhere in the body to shrink; the so-called 'bystander effect'. It is hypothesised that fragments of the dying directly treated tumour are somehow priming the immune system to launch an attack on similar cells.

Under the trade name PV-10, rose bengal has been the subject of clinical trials for its efficacy in the treatment of human melanoma. It is currently in stage III trials.

This practice started experimenting with injecting rose bengal in 2009 after reading a report that it had been moved onto human trial status.

We had immediate success with a disseminated sarcoma in an old heeler which had been classified as inoperable. We then tried it on a large ulcerating mammary cancer which had already moved and invaded the neighbouring glands. The quantity of tissue in this case which died was more than we expected perhaps because of the malignancy of the tumour but the healing time was satisfactory and the end appearance excellent.

Both these initial cases lived cancer-free for years before other old age factors determined their end. Pain or toxicity has never been an issue. rose bengal has a healing accelerator inherent in it, described as creating "nano sutures".

In the past 8 years we have treated literally hundreds of animals with many different types of cancer using rose bengal, with almost universal success. An early failure was an extremely malignant mast cell tumour on the leg of a boxer, and I have subsequently avoided using this treatment on mast cell tumours. Otherwise we have achieved near perfect success long term.