IPT targets the powerful cell-killing effects of standard chemotherapy on cancer cells, and negates their destructive side effects on healthy tissues.

Insulin Potentiation Therapy (IPT) is a new approach to treating cancer that involves no new drug products. The therapy uses insulin, and takes advantage of the powerful,cell-killing effects of ordinary chemotherapy drugs, used in very low doses. Cancer cells get their energy by secreting their own insulin, and they stimulate themselves to grow by secreting their own insulin-like growth factor (IGF).These are their mechanisms of malignancy. Insulin and IGF work by attaching to special cell membrane receptors, and these receptors are sixteen times more concentrated on cancer cell membranes than on normal cells. These receptors are the key to IPT. Using insulin in IPT, the end result is that the low dose chemotherapy gets channeled specifically inside the cancer cells, killing them more effectively,and with no chemotherapy side-effects. IPT is ingenious;it kills cancer cells by using the very same mechanisms that cancer cells use to kill people.

Insulin Potentiation Therapy was developed in Mexico by a family of physicians there - the Drs. Donato Perez Garcia(see the History of IPT). Over the last twenty-five years(see Chronology of Events in the Scientific Evaluation of IPT), Dr. Ayre has collaborated with his Mexican colleagues by providing a sound scientific basis for the therapy, and getting documentation of this published in the scientific medical literature. Their common goal has always been, and yet remains, to get IPT properly studied in this country so greater numbers of physicians and patients in the United States could use it.

IPT is a powerful drug delivery system that uses ordinary chemotherapy drugs in greatly reduced doses, and makes these work without any of the common side-effects associated with conventional chemotherapy treatment. The results of this cancer treatment have been astounding in many cases. (See Case Reports). The pre-surgical treatment of cases of breast cancer with IPT has produced results that allowed surgery to be avoided altogether in the women treated, again without drug-related side-effects. So promising have been their results that Dr. Ayre and his Mexican colleagues have been invited to present their cases before the Cancer Advisory Panel of the Center for Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda,Maryland. This presentation is scheduled for the month of September, 2000. Hopefully, the results of this presentation will mark "the end of the beginning" to their years-long quest to see IPT scientifically evaluated.

Dr. Ayre is currently practicing IPT here in Chicagoland at his Burr Ridge Clinic. Copies of the text of two Patient Education Brochures entitled "Insulin PotentiationTherapy - IPT" and "Managing Malignancy: Our Answer to Cancer" are included on this website. Two final entries in this presentation of IPT are "Insulin Potentiation Therapy: A Renaissance in Cancer Chemotherapy" and "Hoist by One's Own Petard - The design and the demise of cancer." The first of these is an attempt to make the mechanics of the therapy understandable to lay people.The second is a composition written for publication in the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients (Oct. 1999). This is not meant to be a scientific article. It is a humorous rendering of the history and some of the frustration associated with the twenty-five years of research activity on IPT in this country.