The Biggest Cancer Treatment Mistake, Thinking in Single Options

So by now, you're probably tired of hearing me say, "Cancers are unique from one person to another.

They adapt quickly and hit them hard." And you're probably wondering, what the heck does he mean when he says hit them hard? It's not a matter of firepower.

It's not a matter of more.

It's a matter of diversity.

Because cancers adapt quickly, if you give one drug, even if it's an amazing drug, let's say it is 80% effective at getting rid of, totally curing your cancer.

If you give that one drug and your cancer becomes resistant to it, you're done with that one drug.

That's why we never give chemotherapy that way.

Have you noticed that chemotherapy is always delivered in cocktails rather than single drugs? People don't generally get 5-fluorouracil.

5-fluorouracil is a good drug, but you don't give it by itself.

You give it in combination with many other things because if your tumor is going to adapt quickly and become resistant to a drug, you want to hit with multiple drugs, multiple different pathways so that it makes it as hard as possible for your tumor to become resistant to all of them.

It has to become resistant to a significant number of them to escape.

So you want to hit it with as many different pathways, as many different lines of attack as you possibly can.

Now, that's not what I'm hearing when we talk to clients who were told either this is your only option.

There's almost always more than one option, really.

Talk to us.

We can look at your biomarker data.

We can look at the genomics data.

We can find other drugs.

There is a bit of a caveat to that, but we can find things based on your cancer to give you an expanded set of treatment options.

The other thing is giving more of one drug doesn't necessarily buy you a lot.

Beyond a certain point, they become saturating and the side effect profile ramps up because your side effects are a matter of how much of that drug you give.

Now, each individual drug is going to have a different side effect pattern, but giving more of a drug will give you more of that side effect.

So when you target a tumor with a number of different drugs, you reduce the chances that the tumor can mutate to escape and become resistant to those drugs.

You also can usually lower the dose of each individual drug in that combination, which makes the side effects of each individual drug easier for you to handle.

It's a benefit for treatment efficacy against the cancer.