In this presentation Dr. Dino Prado explains the fundamental distinction between a patient’s inherited genetic makeup (SNP‑based vulnerabilities) and the genetic profile of the tumor itself, arguing that both must be addressed to achieve effective cancer treatment. He outlines common inherited weaknesses—impaired detoxification pathways, heightened inflammatory signaling (e.g., IL‑6, IL‑2), immune deficiencies, methylation defects (e.g., MTHFR), and dysbiotic gut microbiomes—and describes how diet, specific foods, herbs, supplements, sleep, and lifestyle can strengthen these areas. He then shifts to tumor genetics, describing how DNA mutations, RNA transcriptomics, and spatial immune biology reveal the cancer’s drivers, escape routes, and micro‑environment (cold vs hot tumors). Prado advocates a precision‑oncology workflow that begins with deep molecular mapping of >1,000 biomarkers, feeds the data into custom algorithms, and produces individualized treatment regimens that combine conventional drugs, off‑label agents, repurposed phytotherapeutics, and high‑bioavailability delivery methods (IV, nanoparticle). He contrasts this with standard oncology, which typically evaluates only 20‑24 markers and applies high‑dose chemotherapy without accounting for patient‑specific weaknesses, leading to suboptimal responses and toxicity. A case vignette of “Betty” illustrates how ignoring inherited SNPs and tumor heterogeneity can limit outcomes. The talk concludes that integrating patient genetics, tumor genetics, and root‑cause factors (infections, heavy metals, toxins) represents a next‑generation, holistic precision oncology model that can improve remission rates and quality of life.
Chapters
Your genetics versus the tumor genetics. That's what we're going to talk about today. There tends to be lots of confusion in patients and understanding the difference. But with this, it's so important in the space of precision oncology. Your genetics are the ones you were born with. That's what God gave you. And there are weaknesses in all of our genetics, such as our ability to take out the trash, our detoxification, our inflammatory network. Some people produce more inflammation, IL6 and IL2. Other patients have immune system problems. Others have problems methylating, which is a really big part of the population. But that's different than your tumor genetics genetics. Your tumor genetics have their own mutations that can tell us better how to shut the cancer down and treat it. And you can have DNA, RNA involved with that. And so it's a little bit different in the consideration of how we're going to build treatment. I'm Dr. Dino Prado. For the last 25 years, my team and I have helped patients move from the one size fits all model to precision care. Today we're going to talk about this important point. The birth weak genetics that we all have, that we inherited, versus the tumor genetics and how those are combined in cancer treatment. Because there are different things. Your genetics, called SNPs, we'll just use that term to keep it simple, are your own genetics. You were born with your own susceptibilities. They can lead to the cause of cancer. Yes, they can make it harder to fight cancer. But these are your kind of inborn errors of metabolism. Your body's ability to detoxify. Somebody may take in a chemical or a toxin and they can eliminate it better than another person. Well, over the years, the toxins build up in a patient who can eliminate those pathways. Maybe their cytochromes or liver pathways are weakened. And so what happens? They have a higher risk of developing cancer. Now, let's say that same patient is doing chemotherapy, and they have a hard time eliminating that chemotherapy. They're going to build more toxicity in their liver because they cannot metabolize that. Those toxic exposures cause a risk. And so this is the difference between what we call your genetics versus the cancer genetics. So we can use things before we get cancer to protect these areas, such as, we've heard of cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, et cetera. We can use arugula, we can use allium, like garlic and onion and walnuts and polyphenols. These all help the liver. Silymarin, glutathione, the Best of the best for the liver. All these things can help us detoxify the liver. But patients that are susceptible to these problems when they give chemotherapy and other medications have a very hard time detoxifying. And they're born with those issues. So there are herbs, diet and lifestyle changes, changes in the gut, microbiome we can use to help the body better detoxify. I named a few of those and there's a number of others. But you can watch my other episodes on dietary improvements with cancer. But this is important. You can also have inflammatory networks where some patients have a higher risk of developing inflammation than others. They may have more IL6, which is a cytokine for inflammation. It's a signal that's there. They can need maybe curcumin, that can help boswellia, There's a lot of other agents they can use that help decrease these inflammatory pathways. And you may ask, what causes inflammation? It's not just the genetics, but maybe a patient has infections or heavy metals, chemical toxins, or they have lots of chronic inflammation from gut lining and inflammatory problems. And over the years these add up and they cause a greater risk of inflammation. Now if a patient has cancer and they're doing cancer treatment and these inflammatory pathways are not working well, the risk of spreading the cancer faster or evading treatment goes up. So these are your own genetics, right before we've even given any medicine. This is what we call the patient's own genetic SNPs, their own genetic background, you versus the tumor to keep it simple. So we can help there with omega 3 fatty acids, better sleep, colorful produce like antioxidants that are going to shut these things down. These are really powerful. Your curcumins again and Boswellia are anti inflammatory. But then you could also have inborn errors of metabolism, of immunity, where your immune system isn't really getting all the information. Maybe you can't fight the infection completely, so it lingers, it never goes away. So a patient may have HHV6 or other infections, they never clear. So we can use tools here, like beta glucans for mushrooms that help stimulate natural killer cells. There's alk, zinc, vitamin D. I mean, I can go on. There's so many things here, certain gut microbiomes like Akkermansia and others, to help build our body's immune system. And there's all kinds of plants and herbs that are used to fight immunity, Garlic can help fight infection, et cetera. But this is why I'm saying these are things that you could have going on Right now and you're a very healthy person or you may have cancer and you have to deal with these because these are those foundational pieces that will lead to the long term outcome you want if you can fix these. The other one everybody should be familiar with is something called methylation. This is like having sticky notes in your DNA. It was one moment it says read this, the other moment it says silence that. And it's off balance. These SNPs like MTHFR are very common in patients and they need tools to help with leafy greens 5 tetramethylfolate, a glycine choline, all these things that can help B12, that can help these pathways that often integrative doctors will use to help their patients. So this is really important. And now gut health is really important for immunity too, because it establishes good microbiome which helps your body's immune system get engaged. And if you've ever seen any of my other talks, you'll see that the immune system is the first and last defense against cancer. So getting these SNPs corrected and now getting our immune system established is so important. So think about that for a moment. I just went over detoxification, inflammation, immunity, and when you look at these things, these are some of, just some of the networks, I'm not getting into complexity here, but some of the networks we're looking at in somebody's normal, healthy genetics that we want to correct. So this, every patient would be doing things to keep these areas strong in the prevention of cancer. But if you're a cancer patient, these areas already weakened and they come into play when you're fighting cancer. Cancer. Now let's talk about the cancer's genetics. That means the tumor itself now has its own mutations and they are basically help us to pick the right treatments so that we can shut the cancer down. Because when we look at the DNA, I always say, here's an example, we're looking at a city from an airplane down low and we can see the cars driving around. That's the DNA, that's the driver. It's telling us where the cancer is going, where the brakes are, et cetera. The rna, which is a whole other part of genetics called transcriptomics, show us the roads and all the ways that the cancer can evade treatment or go in a different direction. And we shut those down and then we bring in the sniper, the police, to go after the tumor. And that's the spatial biology and immunity, which tells us the microenvironment around the tumor. Sometimes these tumors are Cold. They have gangs around them so your immune system can't get to them. And now we're going to teach the immune system to get to the tumor. See, if you think of it this way, now you can see we're looking here at the information of the tumor, and this is different than the information of your own genetics. But the two are important in different ways. What I'm going over with you now, which is the tumor information is critically important to building the treatment. Treatment plan. You want to use a thousand plus data points, not the typical 24 used in standard oncology. You want a thousand plus data points and you want to custom build those medications on label, off label, repurposed phytotherapeutic, all injectable and intravenous at the right doses that also work with your genetics. Isn't that interesting combining the two? So in our algorithms, that's what we do. We look at your susceptible weaknesses, but we also look at the cancer's genetics. And the combinations allow us to strengthen the body where your natural weaknesses are, and at the same time fight the cancer where the cancer weaknesses are. This is such a shift in oncology, I can't explain it. Your standard oncology doesn't do this. Integrative oncology doesn't have usually the technology to combine all of this. They might do some of the genetic snips on a patient to strengthen them, methylation, basic stuff. But here we're talking about an advanced ecosystem of strengthening the patient's health while at the same time going after the cancer. That's why DNA, RNA and spatial immune biology is critically important. Because the spatial biology with immune profiling is critical in telling us how do we get the immune system in to kill this cancer and do it everywhere else in the body. And that's why deep mapping is the first place to start. Get all the biomarkers, match them, custom build the medications, and then use smart approaches to deliver these medicines, whether they're the natural agents, phytotherapeutics, so that they're at high enough bioavailable doses. You'll hear me talk about natural agents and others. Quercetin, curcumin, eccg, resveratrol, we can go on. These are all great polyphenols. The problem is once somebody has cancer, you need these at therapeutic high doses, which orals are very hard, if at all possible, to absorb at those levels. So we have to go IV with nanoparticle particle to get these medicines targeted. Then at the same time, we're also changing Diet and nutrition. We're improving the nutrients. Patients need lots of nutrition with cancer. They need enzymatic support, mineral support, all happening at the same time to strengthen their bodies. And we need to bring their inflammation down. We need to help their body fight the cancer with stronger immunity and then we need to target the cancer specifically with the care they need to help them respond to care. So I hope you're starting to see the difference. You have your genetics you're born with. Everybody has issues in their personal genetics in one area or another and they can strengthen it with diet, lifestyle and supplements, things like sleep, exercise. Nutrition is very important and supplements can be critical. Matching those for prevention is important. When you have cancer, you also have your cancer genetics and you want to start with that 1000 plus marker so you can map everything out and get targeted care before you start just diving in with standard of care oncology, which may have 20 or 24 points, giving high dose chemo and now weakening the body. So let me give you an example. Betty has cancer. She doesn't know any of her genetic risks in her body. She doesn't know her SNP problems, she just starts standard chemotherapy. By the way, this is most patients and she's on high dose chemo that isn't even typed for her. She doesn't know that because it's used from an NCCNN guideline, which is population health that was used to treat the general population. Remember I said this before, Cancer has heterogeneicity. Two patients with the same type and stage of cancer are going to have totally different markers. And that's the key to precision oncology because we can find those markers and treat them. So we take Betty now and let's say she's doing high dose chemotherapy and standard of care oncology, but she has problems with her immune system, genetically has problems with her inflammation. And guess what that chemotherap is going to do. It might kill the cancer 20, 30%, but it can come back. And in addition to coming back, she's going to have worse inflammation, more side effects. Her immune system is wiped out because of the fact that she has genetic susceptibility and she can't take out the trash. So her liver is built up with all this toxicity. She's developed neurological problems, brain fog, pain and other areas because her body was not strong and created a strong foundation to take the care. In addition to that, the treatment she was given was the wrong treatment and it was high dose, way too high a dose for her body to metabolize. And in the end she got some response, but not the full response she wanted. So you can start to see why your genetics alongside the cancer genetics are important now. The cancer genetics are paramount because they tell us how to fight the cancer. But also looking at your weaknesses, and I'll go a step further, your infections, chemical toxins, heavy metals, do you have viral, bacterial, fungal, mycotoxins, parasites? Those are critical because those are causing your immune system to be weak. Or do you have heavy metals like lead or other toxins in the body, Mercury. That needs to be cleaned out because this is weaken to your immune system. So those things are critical alongside the care. And that's what proper precision holistic care looks like. You're looking at all of these data, your SNPs, your personal genetics, the genetics of the tumor and causative agents with root cause analysis to find out what's causes cancer. And then the algorithms are built and deployed customly and the medicines are made just for each individual patient. This is the difference of precision oncology. Yes, it's like a decade or 15 years ahead of the world, but that's where it needs to go. And I believe that's where we're going to see the greatest remission and responses, where everything can be targeted. Fairly simple with very high quality of life for our patients. I hope this was helpful and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing. Sam.
