Cancer Survival Rates Are Misleading | Here's Why

In January 2026, the American Cancer Society dropped a headline that sounds like victory. Cancer survival just hit 70%. But here's the problem. Yes, there's real progress, but behind that, we're really not talking about late-stage cancers. It can be very misleading. But here's what I want you to understand, because this is where patients get misled by the numbers that are technically true but skewed, because that's what they do. They skew the numbers. All cancers combined, yes, 70% improvement. Most of that is early-stage disease, because once cancer is metastatic distant, and more complex, American Cancer Society will tell you, yes, the results are not gonna be 70% across every late-stage cancer. In that community, they tried to say the combined success was around 35%. And for some of the deadliest cancers, I'm gonna give you the real number. It's more like 3 to 5% with late-stage cancers. And the reason I tell you this is because the American Cancer Society gets money from Pfizer, like $15 million. They're involved in their own investment funds. I've done other episodes on that. But today I'm gonna unpack the real story behind these headlines. What's the 70% really mean? Why survival numbers can look better without anyone really feeling like they're getting well with late-stage disease. Why early-stage cancers can win because we found them early and mainly surgery is doing this job, but late-stage cancer still can be brutal and need good targeting. And how precision oncology changes the game with the strategy and targeting, especially for advanced disease. So stay with me to the end because I'm gonna give you a short list of questions that can help change your plan when you're working with your doctor. I'm Dr. Dino Prato, founder of the Invita Medical Center. For the last 25 years, my team and I have worked with late-stage complex cancers using technology from all over the world to help our patients. And I'm going to go over with you today in this episode why these numbers are skewed and how to really improve on them. Make sure you're working with a doctor before you change anything. So let's get started. The American Cancer Society reported that the 5-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined reached 70% for people diagnosed between 2015 and 2021. That's a milestone, but Here's the hidden truth. The number is an average across everything. Cancers that are very curable because of early diagnosis and really surgery to the ones that are really late stage and distant. So they're extremely different with some of them having a survival rate of less than 3%. And that's the problem with the American Cancer Society. I believe they get paid by the big groups and they basically push big pharma chemotherapy. They're invested in it and they get money from groups like Pfizer. So it's really not this independent body helping people. I've been around for many years. That's my opinion. Doesn't mean they're not doing good things that are non-for-profit, but in my opinion, they're really just promoting standard of care, which I believe is not the best care. In our clinical opinion, best care is precision, not just a one-size-fits-all. That's what they tend to push. And the inside to that is that metastatic cancers do not have these great responses, but when you use precision oncology, I believe they can improve tremendously, way above and beyond the averages, because you have targeting. And when you have targeting, you really do change the statistics for yourself, because two people are not the same. Two patients people with the same type and stage of cancer will have totally different markers when you do deep testing. Standard of care, which is promoted by the American Cancer Society, will give you 24 markers— biopsies, tumor markers, and imaging. That's it. And if you're lucky, maybe a DNA test, and you've got a few hundred markers. I'm talking about 1,000+ markers with RNA transcriptomics, immune spatial biology, immune profiling, and next-generation sequencing for DNA, and custom building each treatment for each patient, which is precision, not a one-size-fits-all. So here's what people don't realize. These headlines are survival, but what people think they're hearing is we're curing late-stage cancer, and that's absolutely not true in the standard of care. Those are not the same statement. And the American Cancer Society uses these relative survival data to kind of essentially confuse people into thinking everything's getting better. Now here's the trap: when you detect cancer early, survival rates can rise because you found it early. And I've done episodes on early detection. You do screening, it's fantastic, you catch it early, take it out, it's a cure. Fantastic. But when it's metastasized, it's moved throughout the body, or you already failed a round of chemotherapy, now you're dealing with a very different cancer. So yes, if we're saving lives in early stage, American Cancer Society is right. But in late stage, we have a whole different ball game. And so the headlines can be very misleading. Early stage cancers are more really successful with surgical removal because you got rid of it all. Late stage cancers are a whole nother thing. So let me say this in a simple way: early stage cancers, the biggest lifesaver is surgery, not a fantasy drug. And in late stage cancers, things change tremendously. So if you find it early, remove it, clear margins, great. You still need to change diet, lifestyle, find causative factors I think all those things are going to be important for long-term quality of life. But that's where the American Cancer Society is getting these great numbers, and I'm grateful for those. We need them. We want to see people getting well. But in late stage, like stage 4 complex cancers, those numbers are not happening, and we can change that. So here's what the public rarely sees: the split between a localized tumor and one that's distant and metastatic. So we can take a colon cancer that's localized and removed, and it's like a 90-plus percent survival and cure rate. Distant, it goes all the way down to 16. Lung, the same thing. If it's localized flies and, and you remove it, it could be very high. But then if it's metastatic, it's very low, to the point where many cancers like pancreatic and really complex cancers can be like esophageal and others, bile duct, and, and all these stomach cancers can be down to 3, 4%, 5%, 8%. It's very low. So this is why I'm trying to explain the difference between that 70% number is really more like 3 to 5% in late-stage cancers. And here's a reason: the headline is dealing with early-stage cancers. And with early cancer detection tests, I hope those numbers continue to get better for many patients. But with late-stage cancers, those that have spread to organs or have distances and more difficult stages, more complexity, those success rates really haven't improved as much as we'd like them to. And the main reason is we're not customizing care. I believe the technology already exists. We're just not customizing it for the patient like we do in precision oncology. You're being stuck in a one-size-fits-all model of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network that is not reviewing all the resistant pathways, immune landscape, microenvironments, like things I've talked about. So when people say cancer is being cured now, when they often mean more early-stage cancers are being detected and removed. That's the correct statement. So why that matters is because we don't want people to stop treatment thinking their treatment is fantastic. We actually want them to go deeper to get the care they need. So now, late-stage disease. Standard tools often do something valuable. They buy you time, but they're not necessarily curative like we want them to be because they don't usually involve the full complexity of immunotherapy. Chemo and even smart drugs slows down the growth. Targeted therapy can be powerful, but until you include immunotherapy, you don't get the response you want with long-term care. The immune system is the first and last defense against cancer, which brings us to the most important thing. Are you getting customized immunotherapy so your results can get out of the 3 to 5% and go much higher, turning cold tumors hot with custom targeting? See, that's what I want to get to, because these numbers get people's attention, but they're not really addressing the fact that we lack customized immunotherapy. We have new immunotherapy drugs, but they're not customized. That's what precision oncology focuses on, an immune-centric care, whether it's chemo, SIPI, chemo-immuno precision injection direct to tumor, or cancer cell vaccines that we built using autologous adoptive immunotherapies. They're all custom-built for the patients, and they're based on the patient's individual targets. That's the difference. You get the T cells involved, the natural killer cells, you start in getting the, the new neoantigens information to the, to the immune system. You see an immunotherapy that can be durable and make a difference. So that's the key question: are you doing immunotherapy? Are you doing customized immunotherapy? And then these statistical numbers, they don't really count for you because you're doing something that most people are not. Now let me get this point across. Precision medicine doesn't reject surgery, radiation, and chemo. Not at all. But it's customizing the right ones to make the care immune-centric so patients can have a better quality of life and a better response. If you look at studies like iPredict or Winther, they show the power of precision oncology. If you look at the published study we did in 2024, 35 times better outcomes with 43 times better quality of life because of precision oncology. And we can watch that in real time. It's called monitoring the patient in real time before the tumor returns or to see if the treatment is working with adaptive monitoring. This makes the difference. And so that's why I want to encourage you to look beyond these numbers and start really seeing the difference with precision oncology. When we look at the WINTHER study, it was pivotal because it showed us that you need to go beyond DNA and look at RNA. So that was fantastic because now RNA needs to be targeted. Who's testing for RNA transcriptomics and building custom treatments? Not many. And yet that's a critical part of our precision oncology mindset. I-PREDICT was another study that showed us if you look at the right biomarker matching, you're going to get a better response and disease control because of it. So it helps you slow things down with some of these specialty drugs, which then can allow us to get immunotherapy on board so patients can have better durable responses. So when you put this all together, the answer is we need to look at more late-stage cancers with a precision oncology mindset, and then we can get these numbers to greatly improve. I'm really excited about the responses we're getting with early-stage disease, and that's great, but the American Cancer Society is promoting a standard of care, and I really believe that what people need is precision care. They need it customized to their biology, not a one-size-fits-all. So it moves the money away from Big Pharma and moves it into care where your doctor can treat you with what you need. Immunotherapy is a critical part of cancer. It makes all the difference, and it really helps people get durable responses. And so to get that, you have to ask your doctor the right questions, make sure you're getting the right care, and take ownership of your care. So I hope this was fruitful, gave you an idea. Yes, cancer survival is hitting 70% if we catch it early, but the headlines are driven largely by early stage detection. The American Cancer Society, which in my opinion is in the pocket of Big Pharma, just got $15 million from Pfizer, has their own funds to make money on research and in development, and it's standard of care. But if we look at precision oncology with late-stage cancer patients, it can make a world of difference. We don't want to see 3% success rate with pancreatic esophageal, or 30% in breast, or whatever the numbers are. We want that to go way up. And when we get the right targeting, we can move out of fear and improve those results. Those don't have to be your statistics. Yours can be based on your specific markers and targeting with deep mapping, smarter sequencing, and a real-time strategy that's custom-built for you. That's what we need to encourage. So I know that 90% of you watching haven't subscribed subscribed. Help us to get the channel out there so that we can help people learn about precision oncology and not fall into the one-size-fits-all. I hope you found this episode helpful, and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.