This New Cancer Device Just Got FDA Approval

Pancreatic cancer just got a breakthrough headline. Wearable device, FDA approved, and yes, this is real. But here's what I need you to understand before the internet turns into another false promise. This is not a cure. This is a tool. And if you don't understand what the tool actually does, you can't build the best treatment strategy. A new device works by disrupting cancer cell division. In plain language, it may help slow cancer down, and in some cases, buying time for what really matters, getting the immune system to attack the cancer. But slowing division is not the same thing as eradicating cancer. And in pancreatic cancer, if your goal is long-term remission, you have to think beyond slowing. You have to think about the immune system. That's really true of most cancers in the body and targeting it with immunotherapy. At the end of the day, your immune system is the first and last defense against cancer. So today I'm going to walk you through this new pancreatic electric field device that actually does have some benefit and what it does and what it doesn't do and why I see it as a possible time-buying strategy along with the right treatment regimen, not as a standalone, to help patients get to the next level. I'm Dr. Dino Prato, founder of Invita Medical Center. For the last 25 years, my team and I have helped thousands of patients who failed some of the top cancer hospitals around the world by using precision targeting. So before you do anything, make sure you're working with a doctor, and let's get started into this episode. Let's talk about this device called the Optune Pax. It uses tumor treating fields, or TT fields, That means low-intensity alternating electric fields aim at disrupting the cancer cell's division. And you just wear it on the outside, right around that region. And here's the simple version of kind of what it does. Cancer cells like to divide fast. That's one of the things that they do. And so what this does is it interferes with the machinery within the cancer cells to stop it from dividing. So the cell tries to split and divide, and that process gets disrupted. That's why it's a very interesting device. This really has to do with physics and understanding cell division, not just another drug. So I like it, and it doesn't have the toxicity of other drugs. And yes, that really does matter because oftentimes patients are put on a lot of medication that doesn't work. In fact, 90% of the patients we see after we test them are on the wrong medications. At least one or more drugs are not correct selections for them. The answer is simply patients aren't getting deep testing in multiomics. They're not getting the right targets, and they're basically following the one-size-fits-all double-blind placebo clinical trial regimens of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. And if you fail one regimen, you go into another regimen. So Oncology needs to move beyond that. They need to get into precision. That's no question. And this device helps us move into physics. We're starting to look now at electrical fields, and it's groundbreaking, and it can help us look at the core mechanism of how to slow down cancer. And that's really important. It's very useful. And it's important to be honest that this is not some cure to pancreatic cancer, but it buys us time. And you may ask yourself, why does it buy us time? It buys us time so that we can get the immune system involved and get that tumor finally treated correctly. Now, today we're talking about pancreatic cancer, but I really see a future for these types of devices in really late-stage cancers. In the area of pancreatic cancer, what you have to understand is slowing it down does buy you time so that you can get the right treatment to the tumor. But many pancreatic cancers have these things called stromal barriers, so less than even 1 or 2% of an IV chemo would ever make it to the tumor. Can you imagine that? So here's a patient getting all this toxic medication, none of it actually making to the tumor, and really wiping out their immune system. And that's one of the reasons why people aren't very successful in treating pancreatic cancer. This device, along with the right drug regimen, treatments can make a difference because it can slow down the division. Now, this is not a new company. It's been around for a while. Novocure has been doing these TT field platforms with glioblastoma and brain cancers for years. I've never seen it be a home run, and we've treated, you know, a number of glioblastomas, but it is somewhat helpful. I'm thinking in pancreatic cancer it'll be a little bit more helpful because you have less barriers to getting to the tissue. But to be straightforward, this is not going to be a cure. It's going to slow things down, but it's going to allow us to get to where I want to talk about, which is immunotherapy direct to the tumor. So in my clinical experience, I never saw that brain cancer treatment be like a home run. It was helpful, but I didn't see it really do what we wanted to do. Think of it as this electrical device is slowing it down just a little bit so we can get to the tumor with direct immunotherapy. So I told you about how these tumors have stromal barriers and they're difficult to get to, and you want to think about the fact that if you give an IV chemotherapy, very little is going to get to the tumor. So how do we fix that? One of the ways we do that is with deep testing. So multi-omics— DNA, next-generation sequencing, RNA, transcriptomics, immune profiling, and immune spatial biology. Now we know all the targets of the pancreatic cancer and the tumor microenvironment around the tumor, because now we know why the immune system is not getting to the tumor, meaning the pancreatic cancer is cold instead of hot. And because these pancreatic cancers mutate so quickly— they're called dirty cancers, they can mutate every 3, 4, 6 weeks— the targeting is so important, and we need to get around that dense stromal barrier. And one of the ways we do this— there's a lot of tools we use— we get direct to tumor using chemo-immuno precision injections. We use a catheter the size of the hair and build an immunotherapy direct at the tumor. So how the tumor releases neoantigens, tumor fragments, damage-associated molecular patterns, all this inflammation that gets your dendritic cells to mature, your natural killer cells to respond, your T cells. And we train the body's immune system to recognize a tumor and go after it everywhere in the body. And so this device can be used in combination. So as you're killing the cancer with this treatment, you can keep all the cancer cells kind of in that area at bay from metastasizing, growing and spreading, or mutating even further. That's where we can see a great potential benefit of combining immunotherapy along with TT fields and this device that can help the tumor. It's just an idea, and I like the idea because in some cases it's very gentle, doesn't have any side effects, and it doesn't hurt. It's always a good idea as you're walking around to actually do something therapeutic to shut that cancer down. A lot of us in the world of integrative medicine are very excited about electrical fields, photodynamic therapy, other tools I won't mention here in this episode where it uses electricity and other tools to help shut tumors down. And here's one that's FDA approved, but it shouldn't be seen as a cure-all. It should be seen as an adjuvant with the right combination because pancreatic pancreatic cancer and a lot of cancers, they're not all the same. They have different mutations, different pathways, different immune responses, and that's why we need deep multiomics to find the right targets for the patients. This is where I believe we'll see longer-term responses when we get direct to tumor, as we've seen with some of our patients, and using a combination of tools to help slow things down to give people a better quality and length of life. So we're in an exciting time. I'm showing you new technology that's coming out, and this new conversation with Optune and pancreatic cancer and the combination immunotherapy could really do a lot of to help patients. But I don't want people to think of this device and stop there because they might be wasting their time to getting the right treatments they need to get the longer-term responses they want. That means don't look at the device as a cure. Look at it as buying you time. And if you utilize it, combine it with the right immunotherapy so that you can take advantage of that time in which the cancer is kind of in a staystill, if you will, so that your treatment can go to the tumor. So now we can go to the tumor and frack it, meaning provide that treatment directly to the tumor at the pancreatic cancer sites and turn on the immune system, the antigen the damage-associated molecular patterns, and get the immune system to recognize that cancer. And with other targets, we can give the body the ability to get memory against that cancer. So now we can get a longer-term response. That's going to be, in my clinical opinion, the key to long-term remissions. So I hope you found this episode helpful. Many of you have not subscribed. Please subscribe. Share the information with people so they can learn about precision oncology, new techniques and information that can help them. And we can get the word out there about precision oncology instead of just being stuck in the one-size-fits-all model that everybody is doing. I hope you found this episode helpful, and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.