Why Is Cancer So Hard To Beat?

Everybody wants to know, can you kill my cancer? And that's the right question, but the wrong starting point. The better question is, what is making my cancer so hard to kill? Why is it so resistant to treatment? And in this episode, we're going to talk about the hidden forces of resistance, why cancer continues to grow, and how precision targeting can help flip that entire script. I'm Dr. Dino Prado. For the last 25 years, my team and I have worked with the most difficult cancers by the grace of God, helping patients that have failed some of the top hospitals across the country. And when we move away from the standard of care, the ones size fits all model to the n of 1 precision, we see outcomes improve. And this is because of data and targets. In this episode, I'm going to continue to talk about what makes cancer so hard to kill and how can we improve treatment. Overcoming resistance. So it's important for you to understand cancer has a mitochondrial component, which we'll talk about in a minute, and it has a mutational component. You remember the mitochondria inside your cells that creates energy. There are things that disrupt it, such as infections, chemical toxins, heavy metals, and most of those never get tested for. But they can be the drivers, if you will, the fire underneath, the fuel of the canc. But then you have mutations at the tumors themselves, which they themselves can come up spontaneously, and they can also grow and become resistant to treatment. So these are what we call the biphasic understanding. Both these things, when you look at it, they're both evading the immune system. So the immune system becomes a central piece to the puzzle. And we're going to talk about how to make sure that gets engaged. So when you use standard oncology, you're using averages, double blind placebo, clinical trial averages that may not be an exact fit for you. In addition to that, patients will get high doses of chemo, which also can cause the cancer to grow and spread. And so we need to get over these roadblocks. And the other thing is when we give chemotherapy, only 2 to 5% of any IV drug chemotherapy gets to the tumor. So now it's harming the body. Personalized precision medicine works in a different way than standard oncology because it uses a thousand plus data points over the average 24, which is created from a biopsy, tumor marker and imaging. And then when we have that data, we can really flip the switch. We can start targeting, looking at all of these resistant pathways and aim to overcome them. We're also going to be tackling things like cancer stem Cells, how they come back so you could have a pat who gets their cancer treated. It's all gone. But they have this stubborn cancer stem cells that return. And there are phytotherapeutics that in the right targets may help us here to shut these down. These are some of the key aspects to helping these cancers overcome resistance. So let's start with the biphasic nature of cancer. We have the genetic and the mitochondrial components kind of they're not exclusive, but for educational purposes. A good way to talk about Engine 1, let's call it genetics. You have these mutations happening at the tumor. They're changing, becoming resistant. If the chemo isn't working, it's just becoming more resistant, more diffic to treat. It's evading the immune system so it can't find it. So these drugs are also weakening the immune system, natural killer cells. But it really is harming the body when we do that. But you have a genetic mutation occurring on the second engine. We have mitochondria, shifts in metabolism. You may have heard this where cancers feed on sugar, they go to fermentation versus using oxygen. The warburg effect. Cells are healthy, they use oxygen. When they're cancerous, they tend to shift to fermentation. And when they do that, they're using sugar as their main form of energy instead of oxygen. So this is an important aspect. So this engine of mitochondria is because the mitochondria can be affected by infections, chemical toxins, heavy metals. And modern science accepts this. Now it's taken a while, but according to discovery in 2022, metabolic reprogramming and immune evasion are at the core hallmarks of cancer. And according to Thomas Seyfried, mitochondrial dysfunction pushes that sugar burning state. But that's not the whole story. You can't just put people on a ketogenic diet, which is a good move, and they could go into remission, that'd be great. But we don't see that. And we've been doing that for 25 years. So that's a piece of the puzzle. And it doesn't work for everybody in that same. There are other things that affect the mitochondria, such as infections which rarely get tested. Viruses, bacteria, fungus, parasites, you name it. And things even like lyme disease. And when you have these infections, you get an immune depression and the immune system gets weak and you've got uncontrolled growth of mutations. Also these mitochondria operating on less oxygen. So you start to get something called hypoxia. This low oxygen state fuels cancer, growth fuels the blood supplies, the tumor fuels the weakened immunity. So you can start to see that you have this engine of metabolism and this engine of mutation and they actually can communicate with each other, other. And it's so important that we address all these components. According to the frontiers in oncology, the immune system signaling and transduction really gets down, regulated around this lactic acid or this lack of oxygen. And so we see things like hypoxia inducing factor alpha. And so the reason I bring these things in is because we can test for this. And when we do that in precision oncology, amongst many other tests, we can start to see what's going on here. We can do a root cause analysis. So what causes cancers? Carcinogens, chemical toxins, heavy metals, infections. Those are huge categories. Viral, bacterial, fungal, parasitic. This almost never gets tested. I can tell you in conventional oncology, it's never tested. They don't, they really don't care. They're just going to give chemo. Integrative doctors try to test, but many times it's not even thorough enough because this is what's causing the injury to the mitochondria. This is what's pushing this oxidative stress. And if we want to overcome resistance, we need to eliminate these, because if we don't, the cancers become resistant. It's the fuel that's burning the fire. Think of it this way. You have a pot of water that's boiling, and you may try to cool the water by putting ice in there, but you got to take the fire out from underneath the pot. And that's what these causative agents are important for the mitochondria, for the mutation. So the American Cancer Society has finally acknowledged, yes, infections are related to cancer. However, most patients aren't tested. So the numbers we have aren't accurate. The causes of cancers people view. Heard of human papillomavirus, cervical cancer, Epstein Barr lymphoma, gastrointestinal cancer, Helobacter pylori. I could go on and naming infections and cancer types, but it's actually bigger than that. When you do viral panels, you do bacterial infectious panels, you do fungal panels, mycotoxin panels, parasitic panels. People have infections and those infections are weakening their immune system. And we can actually measure that in precision oncology. And if we don't get rid of that, clear those things, the disease can come back and even other diseases can form later as well. So if we never treat the cause and take the fire out, we're kind of like playing whack a mole, we need to get to that cause. So when we talk about root cause analysis, that's what we're talking about. So why the standard sometimes fails patients, especially in late stage cancers, because we see this is a population based treatment and CCNN guidelines, these are evidence based, they can be valuable, but they're for large groups, not they're not specific, they're not looking at all of the molecular maps and markers that you have. That means that many plans fall short. And on average patients we see in our clinical experience about 90% of the patients are on the wrong chemotherapy. When we do deeper testing, they're on the wrong treatment because they lack the testing, they lack the molecular profiling. They never did root cause analysis. And so instead of having a thousand plus data markers with next generation sequencing, RNA transcriptomics and immune targeting, immune profiling and spatial biology. The JAMA in network oncology and open analysis also says NCCNNG guidelines is a consensus and it's evidence based, driven on population health. You're not the population and you're not the average. And that's why we have seen great advantages with precision oncology because there's a heterogenicity. Every cancer is unique, so that's called n of one where the treatment is built around you, target mapped and gets to all of this evidence, data based protocols that really changes the game. It flips the entire switch on the cancer. The other problem we have is with NCCNN guidelines, which is all the standard chemo, no matter what top hospitals you go, you're getting what's called maximum therapeutic dose. And when you give higher doses of chemo, if your chemo is incorrect, you're in trouble because it's going to push resistance and mutation. It actually weakens the natural killer cells. You get a lymphopenia weaken of white blood cells, you get an increase of resistance and more evasion. And we've seen this in a number of cancers where people are put on a drug, it's on the wrong drug, they become resistant. Literally. The chemotherapy is pumped out of the tumor or the cancer cells using like p glycoprotein pumps and other resistant mechanisms. Develops multidrug resistance. And now the cancer is more difficult to treat. And this is why late stage cancers need targeting. They become hyper mu very dangerous. And this is where the cancer can change. Like within every three, four, five or six weeks you got mutations, mutations and the doctor is trying to chase them and there's no way they can because they're not using precision targeting that's what's happening. That's the difficulty of treating cancers. Overcoming these mutations, it weakens the immune system. If you ever heard what I've said before, your natural killer cells do two things. They go after viruses and they go after cancer cells. And if you take them out, they can't respond. You take them out of the game because of this high dose chemo. And it wasn't targeted. And now it's destroying your nervous system, your healthy organs, your body. It's not doing what it's supp to do. This isn't my opinion. This is actually published in science. And there's a component of a factor called damps. These are really important for the immune system. They're called damage associated molecular patterns. DAMPs are released when you kill the cancer cell with chemotherapy. But if you kill too quickly with inflammation in non targeted manner, high dose chemotherapy, you can release the damps in a method that creates a loud inflammation pathway that actually makes the cancer grow. Instead of using micro dosing, or what we call genetically targeted fractionated chemotherapy, these low doses, when you have the targets, you can give micro doses, maybe 10%, 15% of the chemo. And now the damps work in your favor. They're actually working to go and tell the natural killer cells, the dendritic cells, where to go and find the cancer and kill it. So it's working in your favor with the immune system, not destroying it like you do with high dose chemotherapy. So timing is really important. So it's not only having the right targets, but then the method of delivery, which is hugely important. The answer is precision targeting and low dose chemotherapy. Oh, by the way, patients keep their hair, Their quality of life is better, their targets work better. And our clinical experience, patients look like they're on vacation of what patients look like in a cancer ward. So here's another gut check for why we get resistance. Only a small fraction of the drug actually reaches a tumor. That means most of it is being pushed out. Tumors can develop stromal barriers. We see this in pancreatic, breast, esophageal, certain cancers. But we see it even in advanced cancers. And we test for this resistance. And when you have stromal barriers, think of this like fibrous around the tumor. It just doesn't even let the chemo in. In a normal setting, you might get 2 to 5%, even get to the tumor. When you have these stromal barriers, forget it. It's like 0.7, 0.3. So what's the chemo doing? Even with nanopart delivery, it's still not getting there. So what do we need to do? And so ways to overcome this is the use of interventional radiology, oncology with using the same drug targets. Now we're able to deliver it directly to the tumor using a catheter the size of a hair, very tiny. Go into the blood supply of the tumor to the belly of the beast, deliver the chemo, seal it and come out. And now you've got the chemo all where you want it. Killing the cancer and creating the damps response, the immune system response, telling your natural killer cells and antigens to go out and kill the rest of the cancer without harming yourself, without getting the side effects you get by getting chemo everywhere in the wrong areas. And you get to these stromal barrier cancers with better responses. So this is huge for pancreatic, for breasts, for so many cancers that have fibrous. The more advanced the cancers, the more likely this is to occur. And certain types of cancers have more stromal barriers than others. But we test for it because everybody is different. And that data tells us a lot. It becomes huge to have precision targets. When you go in, you want to make sure you have the right targets. So number one, you need to plan deeply. You need genetics, ngs, I call that next generation sequencing. You need transcriptomics, rna, you need immune profiling, you need spatial biology and thousands of data markers that are matched to you. Then those best matches are taken and the language of the combination in these algorithms are typed to match the plan for your cancer. Then on label FDA approved chemo drugs or off label drugs, which already may be drugs but approved for a different purpose that can be brought in for you. And integrative agents are combined. See, people mistake the idea that integrative agents are in place. They work together. When you look at treatments, like so many plants have medicinal benefits that are very powerful, they're very chemotherapeutic, they can help chemotherapy drugs work better. And off labeled drugs can do the same thing, but they have to be targeted and matched correctly. Then we can microdose, we can get right to the tumor and avoid the side effects, kill the cancer and not harm the body, not harm the immune system, make the treatment immune centric so the immune system is able to do its work, reduce toxicity. And this is so important. So this is so critical because now we have the data and we can help. We can go after blocking the blood supply to the tumor, we can go after treating it, we can go after finding the right targets and Combining those get our natural killer cells working correctly and we've just flipped a switch on resistance. That's how we do data. We can go right to the tumor and in the same way use trans arterial chemoembolization, shut the blood supply to the tumor using interventional radiology. With the right drug targets, not just the procedure, but the right drug targets. It's the combination. And when we do that, now we can bring in targeted phytotherapeutic agents that work against cancer stem cells. So targeting this with the correct plan makes all the difference. And so we know that this isn't happening in standard oncology. This is why resistance and cancer are so scary. But if we have this data, we don't just have to try one thing or the next. You don't have to guess. You can target and your life worth that. I always said in the beginning people deserve targeting. They deserve this technology. This is the AI, the artificial intelligence, marrying cancer at the highest level. And people are not getting it. And that's a problem. So when we pull all this technology together and we understand cancer is biphasic mitochondria, get rid of the chemicals, toxins, heavy metals, sugars, all those things, it's not just sugar that feed the mutations of the cancer and then go after the mutations with targets re establish the immune system. Now we've changed the game and that's the key. That's how we overcome that. Then we use delivery of drugs in a way that's smart for you microdose, so you have quality life energy, vitality direct to tumor or build immune system targets that are specific for you. And this is what makes a difference. We remove the toxins, the chemicals, you know, what was it? Glycopha, fates, what was it? Infections, what was it? Whatever. There's so many carcinogens, they're removed. The key is through testing we remove the carcinogens, chemicals, heavy metals, toxins, and we get the fire from underneath the cancer to go away. So long term, your immune system has a better chance of responding. And everything's built on you, not on averages. This is the leverage. This changes the game. This is makes oncology, in my opinion, in the future, super oncology. So we can get cancer to go away. We can get to the point that what makes your cancer so hard to treat isn't so hard to treat anymore. When we have the targets, your cancer doesn't have to be difficult. When you have the right information, what is the right plan for you? How do we approach cancer with great targeting. I thank you for joining me and I hope this was helpful. I hope this opened your eyes that really we can change the difficulty of treating cancer when we have the right data and the right precision. May the Lord bless you on your journey to healing. Don't.