Precision Medicine vs. Standard Care: What Patients Need to Know

For more than 25 years, our team has sat across patients that were told something like this. We've done everything we can. Go home, get your affairs in order. There's nothing available anymore that we can do for you. And what I want you to understand is that the data is changing. And what I'm gonna go through here today is how this data is changing oncology, where I think we're gonna be seeing incredible results accelerate. And that data has really begun in our facility and we're expanding it. And it's precision oncology. It's not alternative medicine. Medicine. It's the data-driven care that selects the right treatment at the right microdose, direct to tumor, right immune system care that can change a patient's outcome, quality of life tremendously. And we've shown that in our 2024 publication, which we'll get into. And we have a new one coming out right now, which is showing even better results, but it's sent to be published. So I can't go through all the details, but give you an idea that the data is showing acceleration. Now you marry that to artificial intelligence and the work that we're doing on our team. We're starting to see that cancer is powerfully treated in a way that we've never seen before. So don't be worried if you've exhausted every treatment or you thought there's nothing else out there and you've watched some of my episodes. The technology is moving really quick and it's not about protocols. People always ask about protocols or just the diagnosis. It's the data that's individual to the patient. 2 patients with the exact type of cancer will have different markers. These are biological markers, biomarkers that are very different, immunological markers, RNA and DNA. And when you know those markers and you can We can tailor the medications to the patient. On-label, off-label, even natural agents that you can combine. This idea that there's nothing else that can be done is totally wrong. And we see that 90% of the patients we see are on the wrong treatments. So I'm going to go through some of the past study in 2024, some of the little bit of that what we're seeing in '25, which is even better. And this can make all the difference for the patient. I'm Dr. Dino Prato, founder of Invita Medical Centers. For the last 26 years now, our team and I have treated thousands of cancer patients that have failed care around really the world, but mainly here in the United States at top cancer centers. And it's been this deep data dive, this really focus on precision oncology where we target care for each person, custom build it on each person that has given us the advantage. And it's a big blessing because we're seeing people live longer and respond better to care. And it's a very powerful thing. However, it's not easy to do in standard of care because of big hospitals, big insurance, big pharma. I believe it'll come in the future, but it'll be slow because pharma has to find a way to profit off of every marker, which they will, and slowly bring it market. That doesn't mean that we don't have great medications that are out there. It's just they're not always matched to the right patients and they're in higher doses and not always in the right combinations. Most of the care that people are getting today is double-blind placebo clinical trial, which is population health. It's a clinical trial which approves a drug for a type and stage of cancer, mainly for a type of cancer, and then it's used for that patient. And most of the drugs today are cytostatic. They're slowing down the disease progression, not eliminating it. And I think that's where we need to change things so that people can get better. outcomes. In our 2024 paper, we showed 35 times better response rates with precision oncology. That's what our study showed. And in fact, the data got even better in our next paper that's coming out here soon is a continuation. I think it's one of the largest precision medicine studies when you combine the '24 data and '26, all those years in between, you're talking about almost 500 patients, all that had many times better response rates because of precision oncology. Now, this isn't new. You may have not heard of this, but years before we began this work, there were some other publications like iPredict, which used DNA. And when they did that, people responded much better. Then another study came along called Winther. They used RNA and DNA, and lo and behold, results got better. Well, Invita takes this to an entirely new level. It's not just DNA and RNA, thousands of markers, immunological markers, because the immune system is the first and last defense against cancer. It's the one that is game over. If we can figure out how to help the immune system with that patient, then we can shut down the cancer everywhere in the body. We get what's called a Scopal effect, which means you can treat a tumor in one area and then the rest of the body gets this immune response. So just imagine this with me for a second. There's a tumor in your body and there's a couple ways you can go about it. Obviously, if it's just there and you have no metastatic spread, which oftentimes standard of care does not test well, they'll just do imaging, but you need to look at methylation scores and CTCs because if you surgically remove it, it's great. If there's nothing there, great. That's the cure. You got rid of it. But if it's already spread and micrometastatic, at that point you need to know that That, that immune system needs to get engaged so that the cancer doesn't come back in 6 months, a year, 2 or 3 in a new spot where you're waited with your bated breath saying, geez, I'm waiting for imaging. But you can know this with early indicators. In fact, we run those with all our patients. We can tell if the, the tumor's metastasized before we see it in imaging. That's called leading indicators and adaptive monitoring. Now, let me go back to this. So imagine you have a tumor and instead of just, okay, we know it's moving, it's spreading. So we go to the tumor and we use a catheter the size of a hair, very tiny. Little hair follicle goes right in with genetically targeted immunological medicines specifically designed for that patient. So I don't want you to get confused. It's not the interventional radiology procedure of going in there with a catheter. It's the medicines that are selected for the patient, which is very unique to what we do. And in that algorithm, then the patient's tumor dies, the immune system gets built, and with the goal of care now getting the whole body's immune system to respond. And you did that with a Band-Aid, really no downtime. You don't get the chemotherapy weakness to the rest of the body because when you do IV chemo, maybe less than 2 to 5% actually make it to the tumor. Where's the rest of that toxicity going? To your immune system, to your healthy cells, gastrointestinal. And that's where we get all the side effects. So when a stage 4 or 3 cancer patient is told there's nothing left that can be done, here are the questions I like that you should be asking your oncologist. First of all, did you do the DNA RNA testing, next generation sequencing, RNA transcriptomics, immune profiling, and immune spatial biology? And if you've You've run those tests. Now show me how you've designed the treatment using the right targets for me. And the reason I say that is because likely your oncologist or even an alternative doctor might be working with isn't going to do that level of testing because they don't even have access to those laboratories. We've had to custom build those laboratories in our facilities to get that level of data for a patient. I mean, that's, that's really the level of where we're talking about here in precision oncology. We're talking about 1,200 markers versus standard of care. Biopsy, tumor marker imaging, and maybe you get 24 markers there. And if they're lucky to run a DNA to find a drug match to slow down your cancer with a smart drug, if you have a mutation, then at that point you might look at a few hundred markers. And that's not going to cut it because it's the connection of this data and 26 years of clinical experience of treating thousands of patients that we've been able to model care almost to the point where we can predict response in an interesting way. We can essentially Take the datasets, build the tumor inside our artificial intelligence modeling, because we have our own architectural team here for a number of years. And we can ask the body, if we treat it this way, what is the predictive response? That's exciting because that's the future of people getting out of guesswork and getting into data. And when I say data is going to end cancer, it is by knowing the exact fingerprint of your cancer because it's unique to each person. 2 people with breast cancer, same type and stage, do not have the same markers. Same with colon, prostate, Pancreatic, you name it. And so the first thing you need to understand is when you hear these words, standard of care, which is great, it helps patients in early stage disease, that treatment is scientific from double-blind placebo clinical trials. Maybe it responded for 33% of the patients, the drug got approved or it got fast-tracked. Sometimes the drugs don't even get approved because they actually help long-term remission. They just help because they got some shrinkage and they got fast-tracked on the drug. And that's okay. But what I'm saying is that they're not doing in-depth targeting because that medication may work for a different cancer in a different patient once you have the data. And so standard of care oncology, in my opinion, is using old 1990s, 19— it's old data. Now we have some new drugs coming to the market, immunotherapies, and that's great that people have access to those, but they're still not being targeted well. So that's why you see them only working for a small percentage of patients long-term with late-stage and complex cancers. So instead, if we can reverse engineer the tumor, understand What are the best markers? What are the natural agents? What do the immune system need? What is the right chemotherapy at the right doses so that while you're doing treatment, you can still go hiking, have energy, color in your face? This changes cancer from being a scary disease to a treatable, manageable disease with the goal of long-term remission. See, that's what we're talking about. So when you walk into your doctor's office and you ask these questions, you're teaching your doctor to go, well, where are you learning all of this? Maybe you've heard about this in a paper, but it's not being done. It's being done. It's being done right here in Scottsdale, Arizona. I'm pushing my team as a founder and CEO, to expand the technology faster than ever. And we've been blessed by the patient stories that we get. Now, the patients have different histologies, they'll have different stages, they have different types of diagnoses, different complexities, different genetics, and even the way their body metabolizes the drug called pharmacogenomics. Yet when you look at that biology and you're able to go beyond just EGFR mutations or KRAS mutations, which are great, they give us some targets, but go beyond those to more detailed combinations, RNA expressions, how they're speaking to each other, how they're making the cancer more resistant to treatment, a tumor microenvironment that might be blocking the immune system from doing what it was meant to do. By the grace of God, our immune system over 10,000 times a day eliminates early cancer cells. If that immune system recognizes a tumor, it'll kill it. That's what it does, and that's what it's designed to do. This is so powerful, and you'll see it sprinkled in standard of care. For example, the National Cancer Institute makes this point clearly. They explain that each person's cancer has its own pattern. So now they're finally starting to identify biomarkers, biomarker testing. This will help treatment selection. So that's coming out National Cancer Institute. It's a little late to the game, but that data is far more accelerated than people can ever imagine. It's not just molecular targeting, it's immunological targeting, it's combinations, it's specific to your tumor. And now with artificial intelligence modeling, it's changing everything. It's the data that is going to end the cancer. It's not one treatment, it's finding the exact treatments. There are so many drugs, so many natural treatments, so many on-off-label medications that have been produced over the years, and many of them aren't used. You know, you hear a lot in the news something like ivermectin. It's just being used because it's off-label. But if you have the right targets, and that's just one example, you can custom build medications for patients that really change the world of oncology from like current checkers, or I call outdated oncology, to 4D chess where precision is driving the treatment plan. So it's all about precision. And so when you looked at those studies that I mentioned before, like iPredict, you know, it was the beginning of saying, wait, if we can DNA match, if we can find The mutations of the DNA of that cancer, that tumor, we can better select drugs. Oh, common sense, right? Data drive. And that was considered experimental. You know, it blows my mind how far behind standard oncology is. And I say that with great respect because the data is here, but they can't do it. And here's what the problem is. It's not the doctors. You know, they're well-meaning. It's the institutions. It's run by big pharma, big hospitals, and big insurance, which have the same CPT code billing. And you're stuck in a model that's old, that's billable. Reoccurable, and they call it standard of care, the gold standard. The problem is it's outdated. We're in the age of information. We're in the age of artificial intelligence. We're in the age of transforming every industry, including this one. And that's why this is so important. This intelligent information changes the entire game. We saw that 90% of the patients that we treat, based on our third-party actuarial data, were on the wrong treatments when we did in-depth testing. So the model is broken, and It's made worse by the media. The media attacks anything that's, you know, integrative or precision or alternative because their model is to, you know, support those who fund their advertising. And you've seen this time and time again. So the message that's out there is wrong. I don't want you to just follow this podcast. I don't want you to just follow what you're hearing. I want you to follow the data of your cancer. If you can follow the data of your cancer, you can find solutions like a lock that can be opened up by the right key. That's what I want to get across today, because when you look at our 24 data, it was amazing. We were 35 times better response rates in our clinical data. And our 26th paper, which is coming out, I can't mention it yet completely because it's out for publishing and peer review. The data got even a lot better because the data just keeps improving with targeting, with laboratory testing and better markers. So we're getting to the point where it's just getting so good that we can say to a patient, here's the likelihood of responding to these targeted treatments versus standard of care, which is standard of care oncology. We can predict kind of what those responses are. Now I'm talking about patients who are, you know, in late-stage cancers. They are refractory or failed care or at stage 3 or 4. But the sooner precision oncology comes on board, really at any stage, in our clinical experience, you know, in our team of physicians, patients respond better because we're into targeting. We're taking the guesswork out. And when you take the guesswork out, guess what else happens? It reduces costs from a healthcare system. What not everybody will tell you is that when you actually have the data and you know how to treat a patient, you reduce a lot of, first of all, the suffering of the patient, which is the main reason we do all this work, is that people So the number one goal is to make sure that people don't have to die young or suffer with these cancers or live longer, have better quality of life with their families. That's the number one reason we do what we do. Invitae exists for that reason, and that's our number one goal. Our whole team of 400 people, we're focused on that. But the thing it also does is by having the data and not wasting time on other treatments that are guesswork, you reduce cost because you're not trying that drug or that surgery or that procedure. Instead, you're getting right down to the core question. How can we accurately treat this disease and match it to the best treatment? Because that changes everything, and that's why when we look at the data and what's happening as we marry this information and we custom build care for each patient, precision oncology means you have all the genetic immunological data sets for each individual person, and then it's not a cookbook one size fits all; it's custom built. Remember, when we bring a doctor onto our team, and we have about 50 physicians across all of our network and about 400 people on our team, what we what we realize is it takes about one year and two thousand. And hours of training, whether you're an oncologist or you're a naturopath or primary care or a surgeon, whatever you're doing to learn molecular targeting, because they have to be retrained to see medicine as helping put the program together for the patient based on their markers, mechanism of action, and the way the patient is presenting, which we've done for a number of years. So we have a unique set of datasets because when we run testing, unlike in standard care oncology, you might run for one marker to look for a brand new drug that might help slow things down, meaning more cytostatic. Our algorithms aim to be cytotoxic. That means to eliminate the cancer. And those algorithms require what we call shotgunning. So we look at all the RNA, all the DNA, all the information then leads us. We're not looking for one marker to give a drug that's just been approved. We then look at the data and custom build the medication in our pharmacies, on-label, off-label, repurposed, immunological, integrative, because there's a lot of great integrative agents. You'll see people always complain about integrative and alternative medicine, but it's very powerful because they're adjuvants. They in themselves help the mechanism of the chemotherapy. They help with healing. They help with restoring immunity. So a lot of people will attack these and say, oh, these treatments are not for cancer. Of course they are. They improve oxygen into the tissue. They help immunity. And I've done other episodes on those types of agents, but it's so important to understand that's part of the targeting pathway. So we can make 1 1 11 instead of just 2. And that's why datasets are so important. So I don't want patients to be told, gee, there's nothing else that can be done. There's more information when you run the testing. If you look at our 2024 paper, which looked at 199 patients between the years of 2021 and 2023, and by the way, the new one now combines a total 500 patients, we saw a 72% response rate. Now, our other paper isn't peer-reviewed yet, but we saw those numbers go up significantly with very high response rates in our latest paper. So the data is even better. 88% of the patients in the '24 paper showed clinical benefit. That's much higher now with a larger Why is that important? Because the more patients you put into a study, you don't expect the numbers to get in your favor. You expect them to get worse. What was unique about the work we did in this paper we're publishing now that's still out for publishing is the data got better, which shows you the power of precision oncology from a clinical perspective, from the datasets we take in. So when we were looking at 35 times better outcomes, those have increased. And that's amazing. And when people look at those numbers and say, how's that even possible? It's because we are not guessing. We're letting the data guide. It's not about alternative medicine, conventional medicine. It's the markers that people need to treat them. So don't fall into the information of, you know, media or hospital or a podcast, even the one I'm doing. Let the data guide. Let the biomarkers guide. Let them give you the direction you need and then get the custom-built treatment that's specific to overcome the resistance, rebuild the immune system, because that is important. When we look at longitudinal datasets, it's so powerful. We're seeing outcomes improve. And that's why I say, The data's the end of cancer, and I'm going to keep sharing with you and updating by the grace of God these results, these responses. We're super excited. This changes chemotherapy, immunotherapy, integrative care. It almost doesn't matter because it's the right thing you need at the right dose. Guess what it's going to do? Deliver it in the right way. It's going to get you a better response without all the side effects, improving quality of life. That's the goal of precision oncology. It's really about your tumor biology and understanding how to treat it and the biomarkers that the body needs to treat. That's the key. So thank you for joining. Thank you for joining me, and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.