Many cancer treatments shrink tumors on scans but don't help patients live longer. The speakers challenge the idea that cancer is purely genetic, pointing instead to Warburg's metabolic theory, Mina Bissell's work on the tumor microenvironment, and Tom Seyfried's research on mitochondria as overlooked drivers of cancer behavior.
And it's interesting because there have been a lot of various therapies, a lot from both the standard of care environment as well as what would be perceived as the alternative care environment that have very robust, complete or extremely positive responses to a therapy that just blow your mind on imaging, on dropping of tumor markers. And it looks really good for a short period of time, and then it doesn't. And that's the part we always say it's like, it's actually easy to treat tumors. It's not easy to treat patients with tumors. And that's the part of getting creative. And that's actually where we started to understand through Warburg's work, as well as people at Tom Seyfried and others have brought it back to light. And people like Dr. Mina Bissell in the 1980s started talking about the, basically the tumor microenvironment and the extracellular matrix. And Dr. Seyfried dusted off the idea that maybe mitochondria were the starting point instead of the genes and started looking at this again. And that's when we could actually look back at science and go, okay, for the past 70, 80 years, we've done these what are called nuclear cell, nuclear cell, nuclear transfer studies. So basically taking the. The DNA hard drive, so the genetic hard drive out of a cell and replacing the genetic hard drive in another cell, whether if it was cancerous or not cancerous, you would theoretically, if this was truly a genetic disease, turn that either into a cancer cell or. Or into a healthy cell. And unfortunately, those tests, those research projects never panned out, which started to say, maybe there's something above the genetic expression. And so we still are continuing to put all of our eggs in the basket of genes, despite it not really panning out as much as we'd hope. And yes, you can easily find a target and find a treatment and go after it and get a robust response, but it's never enough.
