Aug 10, 2026 · 40 min · 15 segments
Can artificial intelligence help cancer patients understand their diagnosis, find more personalized treatment options, and become better advocates for their own care? In this episode of Rx for…
I'm assuming that you're referring to the innovative new personalized medicine like the CAR-T cell therapies.
No, that's even more advanced and that's even more, you know, that's yet another wave of things that are extremely promising.
But if you look at, you know, like what is cancer in the first place? You know, like cancer was not something I'd really even thought about until I'm like studying it religiously a year ago.
But what happens with cancer? It's like your own cells, your own genes mutating in a way where it's evading your immune system, growing fast, evading your immune system, and somehow has disabled this mechanism called programmed cell death, which says, hey, you know what? If I'm defective, I should shut down.
So we have, it's kind of a miracle that we've got trillions of cells and they all have the same DNA, you know, from your toenail to your, you know, to your eyelid, it's all the same DNA.
How does that all stay in sync? Well, the fact is, you know, we've gotten mechanisms that keep us in sync.
Once in a while, there's a mutation that kind of escapes all of these systems we have to keep this in check.
And it kind of grows out of control on its own, kind of, you know, not for the whole body.
So traditional chemotherapy was just kill anything that's growing fast, you know, because this is growing fast, kill anything that's growing fast.
So is there a way we can trigger the immune system to find it? And CAR-T is in that category of like, let's use the body's own immune system to hunt these rogue cells down and kill them.
And then the other frontier as well, it hacked its way, cancer is a hacker, and it hacked its way out of Program cell death, the natural shutdown mechanism for defective cells.
So I looked at that and I said, OK, well, I was on an immunotherapy that basically tagged every cell in the whole category and killed them.
And I was on traditional chemotherapy, kill anything that's growing in the original stuff that I was on.
There was another drug that was approved for a different disease that was available but off-label that people had found, but through some first retrospective analysis of other studies, and then with a lot of case studies trying it, found that with the specific mutation I have, this was the key to unhacking the hack on programmed cell death.
So I basically got rid of traditional chemotherapy, kept the immunotherapy, and got this other drug, which was approved for some form of leukemia, not approved for multiple myeloma or the version of multiple
I'm assuming that you're referring to the innovative new personalized medicine like the CAR-T cell therapies.
No, that's even more advanced and that's even more, you know, that's yet another wave of things that are extremely promising.
But if you look at, you know, like what is cancer in the first place? You know, like cancer was not something I'd really even thought about until I'm like studying it religiously a year ago.
But what happens with cancer? It's like your own cells, your own genes mutating in a way where it's evading your immune system, growing fast, evading your immune system, and somehow has disabled this mechanism called programmed cell death, which says, hey, you know what? If I'm defective, I should shut down.
So we have, it's kind of a miracle that we've got trillions of cells and they all have the same DNA, you know, from your toenail to your, you know, to your eyelid, it's all the same DNA.
How does that all stay in sync? Well, the fact is, you know, we've gotten mechanisms that keep us in sync.
Once in a while, there's a mutation that kind of escapes all of these systems we have to keep this in check.
And it kind of grows out of control on its own, kind of, you know, not for the whole body.
So traditional chemotherapy was just kill anything that's growing fast, you know, because this is growing fast, kill anything that's growing fast.
So is there a way we can trigger the immune system to find it? And CAR-T is in that category of like, let's use the body's own immune system to hunt these rogue cells down and kill them.
And then the other frontier as well, it hacked its way, cancer is a hacker, and it hacked its way out of Program cell death, the natural shutdown mechanism for defective cells.
So I looked at that and I said, OK, well, I was on an immunotherapy that basically tagged every cell in the whole category and killed them.
And I was on traditional chemotherapy, kill anything that's growing in the original stuff that I was on.
There was another drug that was approved for a different disease that was available but off-label that people had found, but through some first retrospective analysis of other studies, and then with a lot of case studies trying it, found that with the specific mutation I have, this was the key to unhacking the hack on programmed cell death.
So I basically got rid of traditional chemotherapy, kept the immunotherapy, and got this other drug, which was approved for some form of leukemia, not approved for multiple myeloma or the version of multiple
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