Black seed oil and cancer: what the evidence says

PubMed lists 1,156 papers on black seed or thymoquinone and cancer. 906 are lab or animal studies, and in about 45% of them the substance tested was purified thymoquinone, not the seed or oil people buy. Cells in a dish and mice say little about what a teaspoon of oil does in a person.

No randomized trial has tested black seed, oil or thymoquinone against a tumor in people. The only formal human test of thymoquinone in cancer we found, a 2009 phase I study of 21 patients with advanced cancer published in an Iranian journal PubMed does not index, reported no side effects at 75 to 2,600 mg a day and no anticancer effect.

Small randomized trials point to help with treatment side effects: fewer fevers during chemotherapy in 80 children with brain tumors (2.2% vs 19.3% of low-white-cell episodes), less radiation skin damage with a 5% gel in 62 women with breast cancer, fewer mouth sores with an oil rinse in 54 leukemia patients, and less heart and liver damage in two 40-child leukemia trials from one Egyptian hospital. None was large, and several had no placebo.

A capsule drug made from the seed, NP-101, is now in formal testing: combined with immunotherapy in 12 patients with a rare neuroendocrine cancer, 5 responded, but with no control group that cannot be credited to NP-101. A phase 1 trial at MD Anderson is recruiting.

Black seed can interact with cancer care: case reports describe a large bleed during chemotherapy with antiplatelet drugs, very low platelets around surgery, and bone marrow suppression in a leukemia patient. Tell the oncology team if you take it.

We screened all 61 human-study records in the PubMed list and read every abstract about people with cancer (11 kept); 44 were lab work mislabelled as human, studies of other conditions, or surveys of herbal use. We also read the drug-form records found outside the list.