The Real Reason Cancer Comes Back Even After Remission

Cancer recurrence often stems from dormant cancer cells, not just the primary tumor. These "sleeper cells" can reawaken years later, leading to metastasis.

This video presents a smarter approach to cancer treatment, focusing on preventing recurrence after remission using off-label drugs and integrative agents.

🎯 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why cancer recurrence often begins with dormant cells
- What micrometastatic disease means
- How mTOR fuels cancer regrowth
- How autophagy helps cancer survive under stress
- The role of off-label repurposed medications
- Natural compounds that influence growth pathways
- Why zinc and vitamin D matter for immune function
- The right questions to ask your doctor after remission

📍 Envita Medical Centers – Scottsdale, AZ
🌐 Learn more: www.envita.com
📞 Speak with a care coordinator: 866-830-4576

“Remission is not the end of treatment — it’s the beginning of prevention.”

Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your licensed healthcare provider before making any medical decisions. Individual results will vary, and Envita Medical Centers does not guarantee outcomes. Some treatments discussed may not be FDA-approved or available in all locations. Testimonials are shared with patient consent and may not reflect typical results. Do not delay or disregard professional medical care based on the podcast's content. Certain treatments may be available only at Envita’s international clinic in Hermosillo, Mexico. No specific outcomes are promised or implied.
________________________________________
Outcomes Disclaimer
The results referenced from Envita's Precision Cancer Care: 35-Fold Improvement in Response Rates are from a retrospective analysis of 199 late-stage cancer patients treated at Envita Medical Centers between 2021 and 2023, as published in the Journal of Cancer Therapy. These outcomes are not guaranteed and will vary based on individual factors such as cancer type, stage, genetics, immunity and prior treatments. Any comparisons to standard care or clinical trials are based on published data and internal analysis, not head-to-head studies. Individual results will vary.

You can read the full peer-reviewed study at: 

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=132493

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

What if I told you cancer doesn't always come back because the main tumor returns? It comes back because of what we call sleeper cells, dormant micro metastatic cancer cells. One cell or a tiny cluster, hidden seeds, and years later it just wakes up and becomes metastatic. And so people wonder why cancer returns. Today I'm going to show you a smarter way, once you get into remission, to hold that, stop recurrence using some old drugs that are off-label, integrative agents that can help the body stay in remission, at least aid us in that direction to greatly increase our chances of a long-term remission. I'm Dr. Dino Prado, founder of NVITA Medical Centers. For the last 25 years, my team and I have helped thousands of complex cancer patients that have failed some of the top hospitals in this country that treat cancer. We did it with precision targeting. We're very proud of our results. We published 35 times better outcomes, not percent, and 43 times better quality of life in 2024. And that results continue to improve for us all the time because we're using precision targeting. So today in this episode, I'm going to talk about how do we get cancer to stay away. So make sure you're always working with a doctor before you change anything. And let's get started. So after surgery, chemo, radiation, many patients are told, looks good. See you in three months. Yeah, that sounds normal, but it misses the most dangerous layer: micrometastatic cells, dormant sleepers called disseminated tumor cells that hide in places like the bone marrow. And they may not show up in a scan. So you don't know they're there. They may not raise a tumor marker, but they can still be there. But the real question to ask is how do we potentially eliminate these sleeper cells from coming back later? And what's the techniques for that? That's what we're gonna go through here today. So, this is an important part that I want you to really pay attention to. How do we hold remission? Number one, we're gonna look at mTOR. A lot of you've heard of mTOR. It's a growth switch. MTOR is like the cell's gas pedal, it tells the cell grow, build, divide, and many cancers lean on it for growth. The second thing we're gonna look at is, and this is the escape tunnel. When you block growth, cancers can switch to survival modes and not die off correctly, and they act like a recycling program. And so it breaks down part of itself to survive later under stress. So if you only think of mTOR, you're kind of missing this potential escape of autophagy. Remember, things like intermittent fasting, we know can help with autophagy and cell senescence, but we're gonna go a little bit deeper today and talk about on and off label and natural agents that can help us promote the dying off or the not growing of these cells. I'll give an example here. We have a breast cancer survivor. So we want to target the biology of the dormant disseminated cells. And so we can use a combination. Yes, we can use rampamycin, which shuts down mTOR. It's off label, it's been used in anti-aging for a long time as an inhibitor that could be used. We can give that pulsated to help regulate cell growth. We can also look at other targets along mTOR, drugs like metformin in microdose that can help as well. But now we need to look at how do we disrupt autophagy or how do we keep that going so we don't get that escape strategy. And we can look at drugs like hydroxychloroquine. I know it made the news a little while back, but hydroxychloroquine off-dose can have these benefits: microdose metformin, mTOR, rampomyosin, mTOR. And we can look at hydroxychloroquine with autophagy. So these can be all used very safely because they've been around for a long time. They are called off-label repurposed drugs for maintaining remission long term. And the goal was not to just shrink a big tumor, but the goal here is to prevent the reoccurrence from occurring. And here's what the studies show us. In the dormant cell proliferation setting, the combination arm reported no reoccurrence for three years in a small group. Of course, these are not approved for this. So if we combine using smart drug approaches, like I've just talked about, and I'm about to get into some natural ones because people want to know about natural strategies, and I think they can be effective as well. We want to look at circulating tumor cells to make sure the cancer isn't coming back, monitor these leading indicators way before we see imaging and tumors appear, look at methylation testing. And if a patient's healthy and holding well, we can slow down mTOR with diet, lifestyle, and other inhibitors, improve autophagy with diet and lifestyle and smart drugs off label, and we're gonna see people better hold remission. Now, here's where integrative medicine comes in. They can push similar pathways and actually take things to the next level, in my clinical opinion. Something like curcumin liposomal can work against mTOR, but act as anti-inflammatory as well. So it can have a double benefit and help with circulation. So it can have an anti-metastatic effect. One of my favorites is quercetin, which comes from onions, capers, and apples. But quercetin is shown to help with the PIC3 inhibitor, and it's so powerful on the mTOR pathway, but it's also a zinc ioniform. So if you have a little zinc on board, maybe two milligrams a day, it'll take that zinc, shuttle it in, kill viruses, has anti-cancer properties, antihistamine properties for allergies. It just has a wide array of benefits. EGCG, you'll hear me mention that. That's from green tea. And it's a compound that can activate AMPK. It acts as like a cellular braid and it slows down that mTOR pathway. So now we're hitting this from many angles. Rest veritrol, we can get these liposomal and it's shown to help with the mTOR signaling and also help with our vascular health and help with the prevention. So we can combine some of these under the care of a good doctor. We can add a little bit of zinc so we get the zinc ioniform benefits. Zinc, as we know, can help our immune system in a lot of ways. But here's the twist: when you use it with a zinc ioniform, such thing as hydroxychloroquine or quercetin, we can shuttle them into viruses or into cells to make them work better. So these are the combinations you want to think about to slow down metastases, build good immunity. These are really powerful. Zinc is important for healthy T cell function, low zinc and weaken the immune system. So we want to make sure that we have it not in too high of a dose, but in the right doses. And maybe that's two milligrams a day, or we're eating foods that are rich in zinc, natural m-torb blockers, and we're also looking at intracellular zinc and we're looking at autophagy. So these things can help us in combination hold remissions. And that's what I like. We look at hydroxychloroquine. You know, if you look at it in clinical trials and monitor it, it had benefit. But we see benefits with things like curcumin, quercetin, resveratrol. And there's no reason under the care of a physician you can't use these combinations to give yourself an advantage and help with the cancer maybe staying at bay longer or not coming back. That's the goal and re-engaging our immune system. This is the safety warning that I want to give you. If you're on a checkpoint inhibitor, you don't want to be on hydroxychloroquine because it could affect that. We may use things like EGCG, which may actually improve the PD1 inhibitor or use other tools like beta glucans that can help enhance that. So it's really important you work with a doctor and you have all your targets because once we do deep testing, we can see which combinations are best for you. So you don't have to guess. And you can be on the natural agents and maybe some off-label drugs to improve natural killer cell function, T cell activity, innate immunity, all those things are gonna help you fight off cancer, but at the same time, prevent the sleeper cells from returning. That's the goal. You should never think, oh, I'm done with cancer, I'm gonna watch, wait, and do nothing. No, this is when you dial in the diet, get your microbiome right, start getting your exercise and your tumor microenvironment correct, build the proper immune system that you need, and keep the cancer at bay with these combinations because you're preventing dormant cells from reawakening and you're boosting the immune system. It's a great strategy. And most of these are very well tolerated, they're natural, they have anti-tumor benefits in the literature, they're anti-metastatic and they're anti-angiogenic, stopping blood supply to tumors. So here's the questions you can ask your doctor. Number one, what should I be doing to stay in remission? Well, and they say, watch, wait, we'll rescan you in three months, find a new doctor. But if your doctor says, I've got a plan, I want to put you on bersetin, curcumin, I might put you on hydroxychloroquine, I might combine that with rampamycin and monitor your IGF one. I'm gonna monitor all these circulating tumor cells, then you know you're working with the right doctor. Let's improve your autophagy with diet and fasting. So now you're working with a doctor who understands the cellular biology of cancer and is wanting to boost your immune system, get your zinc in order, your vitamin D. Vitamin D is very important because we want it to be on the higher end, like 8,000, 10,000 IUs a day. We want our vitamin D on our blood test to be at the higher range, not the lower range. And we want our gut microbiome to be healthy. And our doctors can test for that and help you be healthy. That's what they should be doing. Help you hold remission, not just watch and wait. So I hope this was helpful and this gave you an idea of how we can incorporate a plan to hold cancer off. Because the longer it's away, the longer term response we have, the greater chance we have of long-term remission and dare say with the goal of a cure, because that's what we want. Share this episode with others and subscribe so we can get the word of precision oncology out there so people aren't stuck with a one-size-fits-all model. I hope you found this helpful and may the Lord bless you on your journey to healing.