Why Targets Matter Most in Beating Cancer

Everybody calls asking the same question. How well does your treatment work for my cancer, colon, triple negative breast, prostate, pancreatic brain. You can fill in the blank. It's a great question, but a wrong starting point because outcomes rise and fall with one thing. Targets, molecular targets and immunotherapy targets. The better the targets, the better the care we have seen in our experience with patients. I'm Dr. Dino Prado, and for decades I've sat across some patients who've already failed some of the biggest names in oncology across the country. By the grace of God, when we remove the guesswork and move to an N of one precision model that's designed just for you, unusual responses that are positive happen today. I'll show you how to ask your doctor the right questions, whether you're in conventional oncology, integrative oncology, or precision programs like the ones we use at Envita. So here's the goal. You want data over dogma, targets over averages, and precision over hope. As a strategy. What you'll get in this episode is the exact questions to ask your conventional oncologist. What questions to ask your integrative natural medical doctor. In fact, Our pharmacy supplied 4,500 different naturopaths, M.D. dOS that practice functional medicine across the country that use integrative support. So I'm very familiar with that and we use it in our facility too. But I'm going to tell you from my experience, what are the right questions to ask the precision playbook that we use and how it's helped our patients, we're going to cover that as well. And you don't have to write all this down because I'm going to provide a link for you down low, which will give you a pocket checklist or a PDF, something you print out so you can bring it to your office appointments and ask the right questions. So you are doing the right work in trying to get an idea of how this cancer treatment is going to work for you. So let's start with the conventional oncology conversation. Basically, let's translate what you're going to hear. Often we're choosing the regimen that works for your cancer type and your stage of cancer. That sounds reasonable. It also is average based clinical trial groups patients by tumors by type and stage, but not by the multiple personal precision molecular fingerprints. And here's why that's a problem. No two cancers are the same. You can have two breast cancers, same type and stage. When you do the heterogenicity and the testing, you're going to see they're so different. Their heterogeneicity means they're super different. When you look at a thousand markers, they're not the same cancer anymore and their targets are going to work differently and their response is going to be different. So when someone's telling you here's what our response is with a general protocol, it's not as accurate as you need it to be. The real question you need an answer to is how precise is your treatment targeting and have you seen anybody with all my molecular target, how have they responded? Now you're going to get a right response rate and that's not something you can do without testing. Personal targets make a difference. They ensure that you're getting the best clinical results and the best clinical experience because averages are pretty much useless, especially in later stage cancers where people have failed care because earlier stage cancers can be often handled with surgery and people can go into long term remission, which could be great. But at that point, targets aren't so important because the cancer has already been dealt with. But when cancers have failed care or more advanced and metastasized, these targets become even more important. So here's the questions you want to ask and I'll link them below so you don't have to write them all down. But this will give you an idea of what you should be asking better questions so you can prepare for the care that you really want. Number one, which biomarkers did you use to pick my drugs or my oncology agents? You'll ask the same thing in natural care. What did you use to pick my integrative agents and tell me which DNA next generation sequencing, RNA transcriptomics have you used to target my treatment? Which is important, meaning what targets do you have? The second question you'd ask is did you check anything like tumor mutations, burden? Do you understand what my immune profile is? Have you looked at my spatial biology and been able to test for the causative agents to my cancer? And how are you going to treat those? If the answer is we don't know or we don't really test for that, that detail is something we're not familiar with. That's a bad answer because then you're really not going to have any idea of how to predict care because the less targeted you are, the less the quality of the care will be. The next question you're going to want to ask is what percentage of my tumor cells actually express this target? So for example, we've heard of PD1 and PD L1 inhibitors in immunotherapy, but you have a target for it. But what percent of your cells actually have that? Is it 5%, 10%? 20? Because overall PD1 and PD L1 inhibitors may only work, as we know from the data from foundations and oncology and others, on 19% of the patients long term, probably because of several things, the targets aren't at the tumor. So you should ask how many targets do I have? If that's the marker, where is it? And how much do I have around my tumor? And you can get that with spatial biology data. Did anyone run the data and quantify these markers and understand whether I'm immunologically hot or cold and what things need to happen for my immune. See, targeting needs to be done correctly because you have this tumor microenvironment around your tumors, these neighborhoods, and it doesn't translate well into care. If you have a lot of blockades that are stopping your immune system from working. And whether you're giving an immunotherapy or dumping vitamin C or ozone or you name it, phytotherapeutic or methylene blue or even ivermectin, you don't know on off label what's going to do what. And that's why we get calls all the time after people have failed those therapies, not getting the response they want because there was no precision. How is the dosing going to be individual? For me, that's another question based on your body's pharmacogenomics, your ability to metabolize the drug, how are you dosing it? Are you using micro dosing? Are you targeting, how are you delivering the chemo? Because often, as I've said many times before, less than 5%, sometimes 2% of the IV chemotherapy or IV natural agent or any supportive care is actually making it to the tumor. So it's important to understand that how many match targets do we have that addresses my individual cancer? 012 what are the targets and how do those drugs going to work? See, these are the questions that kind of frustrate physicians who aren't trained in molecular targeting or mechanism of action, because that's really what you need answered. Then when you have that information, you can do a better job of predicting whether the care is going to be the best one for you. Another question will be how are you going to measure my results? Are you going to wait for tumor markers and scans? That's fine, but those are lagging indicators. Do you use any real time monitoring like circulating tumor cells, CT free DNA? Do you use any molecular residual disease monitoring or immune activity? Shifts. How are you going to use these markers to help change my care if it isn't working correctly so I can adapt and respond and have a better chance of getting a longer term remission? See, these are the right questions that you're not going to ask because maybe you're not in the healthcare space but now I'm going to help you as I've trained many doctors in the area of molecular targeting, give you the questions to ask so that you have a better way of understanding whether treatment is going to work and most importantly if it's best matched for you. Another question is what's the plan B? So if these treatments don't work, what's the next regimen and how are you going to target that and how are you going to know if that treatment is working or not? See, the plan is everything, the blueprint is everything. These are the questions that are the correct questions to ask. And here are the red flag. We don't do that testing, we're not familiar with that or we just use general information or here's what the NCCNN guidelines do for everybody. To me those are not sufficient questions. We'll just try the keytruda opdivo because it's helped many people in your tumor type and state. Really what's my markers? What percentage? Because really we know that only 19% of them have a long term response. So you can get down to these kinds of details and you can tell how good the medical facility is or the technology is based on these questions. So now you're walking into an integrative natural clinic that's doing great work. I love it. It's supportive, it's necessary. Maybe working on mitochondrial dysfunction, helping your body with metabolism, metabolomics and things like that so you can get to the cause of some of the cancer, maybe infections, chemical toxins. But we still need to ask the right questions. What are the detailed targets you're using to treat me? I mean just like if you're giving a vitamin for a locked door, like a great nutrient, it could be the wrong key. So we need to ask the right questions. What's the mechanism of action for this natural therapy? How is it working on my specific pathway? What are the markers? If it's a phytotherapeutic, if it's an IV agent or an oral nutri nutrient or an oral phytotherapeutic, how's the methylene blue going to work? The ivermectin, the menbendazole, the photodynamic therapy, the hyperthermia, no matter where you go in the world, that's the question. Because maybe if you look at hyperthermia, heat shock proteins isn't what you need for immune system to respond. See this generalized immune boosting approach which we used two decades ago, it helps, it improves quality of life for some patients and helps people recover from the side effects of maybe other treatments that they've done. But unless it's targeted, you're not going to get the goal you want is of the question is how well is this treatment going to respond for me and how long am I going to see benefits from the care? So which biomarkers can you tell me are the right therapeutic fits for me if I'm using an on off label natural agent? That is the question. Not just a general published study that says it works for this cancer type. But I need a specific marker because today we've gone beyond that. We're into genomics, transcriptomics, immune profiling. We have data and if we're using that data, we can be precise. So the other question you're going to ask the doctor that's treating you in integrative medicine is how will you track my results? Are you going to use tumor markers? Biopsy imaging? Okay, that's fine. Are using ctc, circulating tumor cells, using CT DNA? Do you have inflammatory cytokines? Do you have any way of telling it this cancer is coming back before we know it? That's pretty important. Are we using other things like phi or other scales that look for data that's telling us that this cancer might be returning? Do you have a quality life scale that I can look at that tells me if I'm feeling better? My results are improving. See, how do you combine the natural agents with the chemotherapy? Safely looking at my detoxification or cytochrome interactions that may interact with it. When do give the treatment? Is it after the half life of the chemotherapy? And what's the timing based on what I'm doing? See, there's just a good question because you can start to understand that if the physician doesn't understand the half life of the drugs and the combinations, you're not going to be able to know response because it's going to be guesswork. Try this. Take this. We hope this helps. And that's how oncology has gone for the longest time. It's not evidence based. It's kind of like we'll try these things. They're less toxic so they can't hurt. But in fact they can. They may block the conventional care or Targeting that you need or it may enhance it. This is the difference of asking the right questions. How many patients have been on these protocols with these exact markers? Not type and stage of cancer, but with the exact markers I have. And how have you seen them respond? Then you're going to get the answer to your question. What is my potential prognosis and benefit of treatment? That's the question. Similar tumor types with the same name and the same type is not going to tell you what you need to know. It's the markers, it's the targeting the one size fits all protocol of even integrative medicine. Vitamin C, ozone, methylene blue, hyperthermia, hyperbaric oxygen chambers. But they have to be targeted. Yes, it helps increase oxygen. Yes, it helps to decrease glucose. Glucose, yes, it helps increase the immune system. Now what? How does that combine with my care? How is my immune system being blocked so it's not responding to the cancer? We don't need your tumor data is not a good answer. We don't have that information is not a good answer. What we need is precision. So when you're wanting to ask how I'm going to respond to therapy, I can always tell you this. The more precision in my clinical experience, the better the response, the better the quality of life. We published that in 2024 and our responses were very good. 35 times better than conventional. In our cohort of 200 patients, 43 times better quality of life. And that was in 24. And today we've advanced even beyond that. So we'll be publishing that paper coming up soon. But here's how we flipped a script on this whole thing. It's really about n of 1. It's about building the treatment on you. So people want to make good decisions. Family members want to make good decisions for the patients. They want to be able to help. But you can't unless you have this data. I'd love to reach across the screen, take a blood test, tell you exactly what your markers are, and then say, here's your prediction, here's the best treatment plan and here's going to give you the best chance of responding to your goal of long term remission. But that requires testing. That also requires data. And that's what you need to do. You can't just tell somebody over the phone or in a quick conversation, which I've been asked many times, what are my chances of responding? And what I've told patients is we have helped those who have failed everywhere else because of this data. That's the difference. Think of Like a big company like SpaceX that lands a rocket. They're using thousands of data points to get that rocket up, land it to a pinpoint. The more the targets, the better the care. It gets the guesswork out. And even using the molecular targeting, you get repeatability of quality of care. This is how we can tell if the results are good, positive or the responses are negative. We can tell because we have the right markers. We can tell because we're tracking them. We're doing very intense layered testing. DNA next generation sequencing, RNA transcriptomics, thousands of markers. Immune profiling, causative. What's the cause? Root cause? Analysis. Infection. You know, is it bacterial, fungal, parasitic, mycotoxin, viral? Is it from chemical exposures? Is it from. You name it. There's a lot of carcinogenic things. Is that what's linked to the cancer that needs to be treated? What is a tumor? Microenvironment, meaning how's that immune system responding, how's it blocked and how can we turn it back on? I like to say, while others are playing checkers, we're playing 3D chess. Let's say you have desmoplasia blocking the delivery. What's stopping the drug from working? Because there's too much fiber, fibrous tissue around the tumor. Is it the immune system? Is it a combination of those things? See, that's the important thing to ask. And you don't know that without the testing. So if anybody tells you over the phone or in communication, yeah, we can help you. Yeah, we can do this. That's not honest. Until you have the data. Therapies need to be targeted and data needs to be matched. And the better the match, and the more the match, the better the response rate, the better your treatment, the more comprehensive it is and really the truly more holistic it is because they're working together to help you whether you're using on label, off label or integrative agents. Especially when it comes to immunotherapy, you need really good matching. Because if your immune system is cold, which means it's not doing the work of killing the tumors and the cancer cells, you need to turn those. And that always isn't easy because it could be inflammation blocking it. It could be certain cells coming from your bone marrow or around the tumor that are blocking your natural killer cells and dendritic cells, and you want to turn those on. So yeah, you can take a beta glucan, which will be a natural agent, but that may not work for you because that's not going to shift that Spatial biology, but you may need specific targeting in and around that tumor to change that environment. So when you have the appropriate targets, you have the right way of treating. Now you can change the game. You can microdose, you can go directly directed tumor, you can change the responses in our clinical experience significantly. You can use dynamic monitoring so you know if the patient's responding way before a tumor appears, because you have circulating tumor cell data, trajectory, transcriptomics, telling you the patient's responding, stay on course. Methylation scores are improving, they're doing well. Their quality of life metrics are doing really well. And that's what we see on average on our floor. That's about 80, you know, 3 to 85% of our patients at any given time are moving in these positive trends. The most important thing we have to do is get those targets and adapt them to the pat patient's care. So this is the question you want to ask. Are you getting precision? Because everybody wants a simple answer. Yes, you can help me. Come on in. We can do the work. And yes, when you do come in, we're going to do the testing, we're going to do the work. And probably better than almost anyone else in the world in my clinical experience when it comes to this testing and targeting, how many actionable targets you have and how we can address those and the right combinations, that's what you're going to get from the work that we do, not guesswork. And then we're going to tell you what we think the prognosis and care response is as we follow your path. So what's the plan to overcome the resistance of the cancer? What's the plan to rebuild the immune system? What's the plan to get to the root cause? That's all can be done by targeting, not just by guesswork. That's the work that we do here in Nvidia. And so I've created this pocket checklist, the 10 right questions that you can bring to any oncology visit, any integrative doctor's visit, and ask the doctor the questions, what percent of my tumor cells are expressing this? What are the markers? And by asking those questions, you're going to get the right kind of answers that are going to tell you this place knows what they're doing or they don't, or this doctor has a good strategy plan or they don't. And that in my clinical experience is going to give the best understanding of whether the treatment is going to work for you or not. That's the answer you want. Is this going to work? For me, because if you ask that general question, it's just like a clinical trial that treats all the people with the same treatment. It only works for a percentage. The more the molecular targets you have, the higher percentage of working. The more targets, the more target match, the higher the percentage of it working. And you're getting to your goal of getting the good response rate. That's what you need is this transition from guesswork to targeting. So the next time you ask that question, this is what you want to ask. What are the right targets for my cancer? What are the mechanisms to this treatment? How is it going respond? How are you going to monitor it? How are you going to treat the root cause? How are you going to approach this? And when a doctor says, gee, where did you get those questions? You can say, I'm educated, I do my homework, I'm not guessing. I want to guess with my life. My life isn't worth guessing. My life is worth matching the best targets there are so I can get the right drivers to help me with RNA DNA immunity, so I can respond to care and have the best quality of life. That's what I deserve. That's what every patient deserves and that's what every cancer center, in my opinion, should be doing. Whether they're doing supportive care, conventional care, or a combination. That's what a patient deserves. You are not a statistic and you're not an average. And the more you have those targets, in my clinical experience, a better response, the better quality of life you're going to have during care and the better chance of monitoring what you want, which is a long term remission. That's the goal. So that's the work that we do. And that's what I encourage the questions for you to ask the next time you say, hey, what can you do with this triple negative breast cancer or this adenocarcinoma, the colon, stage four? Have you helped other people like that? My answer to you is yes, we've helped many people like that, but which ones? With your specific markers, that takes each person's individual blueprint to identify, and that's how we need to be looking at cancer. I hope this helps answer your question. What should I be asking for? How do I find out if this treatment really works for me? May the Lord bless you on your journey to healing. And with more knowledge, you're going to be able to dispel the fear and get onto the course of care that you need.