Why Do We Guess At Chemo When We Can Test with Dr Robert Hoffman

What if the next meaningful step in cancer care is not another buzzword, but a simple shift toward better testing and smarter nutrient control? Joe Grumbine sits down with Dr. Robert Hoffman for a candid, science-first conversation about keeping cancer in check by targeting what tumors need to grow, and why patients often have to push the system to get the most rational options.

We start with cancer metabolism and methionine dependence, including the low methionine diet and the methioninase enzyme approach. Then we dig into a mind-bending possibility: using the gut microbiome like a factory by inoculating it with bacteria that produce methioninase. Dr. Hoffman explains the research using E. coli strains that can generate active methioninase in the digestive tract, what “tumor targeting bacteria” means, and why defanged Salmonella and oral delivery raise big questions about safety, regulation, and real-world feasibility.

From there, we tackle personalized cancer treatment the way hospitals already handle infections: culture and sensitivity testing. Dr. Hoffman walks through decades of chemosensitivity testing history and the practical promise of 3D tumor culture methods like the histoculture drug response assay (HDRA). We also confront the uncomfortable reasons these tools are not widespread, including guidelines, incentives, workflow friction, and how tumor boards can devolve into guessing when time is short.

If you care about precision oncology that actually earns the word “precision,” this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs more options, and leave a review so more patients can find the conversation. What part of this would you want your cancer center to offer first?

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Straight Talk On Cancer Control

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and I've got with us today Dr. Robert Hoffman. Robert, welcome to the show. No, always my pleasure to be on. Well, it's always fascinating to share and tap into your wealth of knowledge and experience. And it's it's it's my pleasure to always be able to access and and have you come in here. It's wonderful. Called straight talking. We've been talking, yeah, exactly. We we get into facts and and and experience rather than I don't know, theory and feelings. And so many people talk about how they feel about things. And you know, we're trying to solve real problems here. And for anybody who's ever had cancer or known anybody who's gone through having cancer, there couldn't be anything more serious. And the the notion of working with people that are trying to understand how cancers work and how to be able to how to fight it, keep them in control. You know, we talk about curing, but we don't really nobody knows how to cure a cancer, but we know how to keep them in check and keep them from taking over your life and your body and and ultimately causing your demise. You can we all live with cancer cells floating in our in our body, but we can't see them, we can't hear them, scanners can't scan them, but they're there, you know. Anytime you get a mutated cell to a certain point, theoretically it could grow into a cancer, right? Right. So we got to keep things under control. Exactly. That's what this is all about. Good science is what under uh underscores all of this. So I got a couple of things I want to talk to you about. In last week's Zoom call, you brought up a really interesting point and submitted a paper. And for those of you who are listening

The Sunday Zoom Community Approach

SPEAKER_00 2:15

for your first time, Dr. Hoffman has put on for many years now a Zoom call on Sundays at 4 p.m. Pacific time, and the link is in the show notes here. So if you're listening to this, pop it open and look at the show notes. A link to that Zoom, you can join just by clicking the link. But it's a group of people that have all experienced cancer or are supporting somebody who is, and the thing that we all have in common is our knowledge of and using the low methionine diet as well as the methioninease enzyme that you produce, Dr. Hoffman. But we also talk about many, many, many treatments, combinations of treatments, doing things, not doing things, testing things out. We're we're just about everybody on the call, it's their own science experiment. You know, we've all taken agency over our own health. We've all decided that we're the ones responsible. So we're willing to take chances that maybe the doctors aren't. We're willing to tell the doctors what we want, we're willing to go and find a doctor that'll do what we do want. And we share our experiences and support each other in that way. And then most of the time, some of the work that you do in your lab comes up as a published report. We'll talk about it. So, in this last one, you published a report about inoculating a biome, a gut biome, with a bacteria

Probiotic Methioninase In The Microbiome

SPEAKER_00 3:55

that produces methioninase. And I thought it took me a minute for that to really sink in, but it seems brilliant because ultimately when we consume the methioninase, it goes into our GI tract and sits in our intestines and works for a little while for what, four to six hours, something like that, and kind of negates the methionine that's passing by. But what if you had a bacteria in there just doing that all on its own? Creating that methioninase and and causing even to limit or reduce the amount of methionine that's being introduced into your bloodstream at any given time. It seems like a win-win. So why don't let's talk about that for a second? And what what would hold us back or or tell tell tell us a little bit about your experience with that? It just really kind of blew my mind that that's an amazing thought to to to execute.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Okay, so full disclosure, there's a group in China doing similar things. Maybe they might even be a bit ahead of us, we don't know, but they're doing good. So we ourselves have worked on what we call tumor targeting bacteria for most of this century. A number of bacteria seem that they have a uh they naturally target tumors. Maybe there's a lot more nutrients in a tumor. Just the kind they want to eat. Just the kind they want to eat. And one of those bacteria that we worked on mostly was salmonella. Everybody hears the word salmonella, they go, ooh, right. So, but we what we did with the salmonella is we defanged it so it doesn't grow in the normal tissue. And so and we're we're working on getting the methionase gene into this salmonella, uh, but we're a little bit so we on the way to doing that, we said why don't we try the bacteria in which we ferment to produce the methioninase in our fermenter, and why don't we try to just give that to some mice with tumors and see how they do? So this is a an E. coli bacteria, and when people hear E. coli, they don't get so scared, not so scared. And our gut is full of E. coli, different strains. The word coli comes from colon, right? So some guy escherish or something. He described it uh a long time ago. So this was the work done by Dr. Kubota when he was in the lab here, a really brilliant guy. And he started just in in in giving my mouth the the C. coli that produced methionase, and that's how we the same C. coli we put in our fermenter, and that's how we get the first step in making the methionase that we send out to the patients. So this the the this bacteria was making good methionase in the in the mouse's digestive system, and we could inhibit the cancer. As you say, it's a great way to go because if the this E. coli that makes methioninase could integrate itself into our so-called microbiome, the thousands and thousands of different kinds of bacteria we all have in our gut that keep us healthy or if something goes wrong, they make us sick. But mostly they keep us healthy. So we we I think we made some steps. Looks like we might have might be might have integrated at least to some point into the into the gut. We could we could ice, we could collect the feces and we could grow the bacteria out of out of them. So that was all good. So this is a project that needs to be worked on more, and we're gonna do it. We you know there's only so much time in the day, and but this is this is one of the projects that has priority. We're gonna be working on our the spec the E. coli that produces methionase. We introduced the gene into it, and uh we've also introduced the gene into the salmonella. So we'll be working on that. The Chinese group have a different salmonella, I think not as good as our salmonella, in which they introduce methioninase and they want to inject it. And I think that's gonna be a long and tough road to getting it to the patient. The the authorities like the FDA are gonna be kind of scared of get injecting something like salmonella into somebody's bloodstream. So the E. coli seem to do really well by mouth, hoping that our tumor-targeting bacterium can also do well giving it by mouth. It's so far so good. And in so doing, we just call it a probiotic. You go to CVS pharma.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

I love it.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Umpteen million different kinds of microorganisms that you plop down in a pill or a liquid or whatever, and make you live forever. So I like the way the probiotic strategy, just like I like the supplement strategy for our own methionase. And so that's where we are, Joe. It's that paper you saw was a few years old, and it's promising, and we're gonna go forward on it. You know, we got a million things going, and so each one

Hope As A Survival Strategy

SPEAKER_01 10:00

kind of has its own time frame, but it's gonna get there.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

One of the reasons I like talking about your current work is because you know most people know that you know this podcast is really designed for patients to find information and to learn tools and and options that they might have to or they might have in the future, right? Right, right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just knowing that this is being worked on would say that they understand they gotta keep alive because something better in the future.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

100%, 100%. You know, you you you never give up your hope and you never give up your fight. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

No, and that's that was one of the things that I always would never give up because I always thought to myself, well, what if I let go and quit, and then the day after I died, some great new breakthrough happened because I didn't hang on one more day. I just couldn't imagine that, you know. I mean, not that I would give up anyways, but just you know, it was always one more thing. I was like, Yeah, they're working on so many things. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

You you never know what you every day is something new, every day we know more things. So the cancer patient, the most important thing for the cancer patient is to keep their hope, their hope, 100% of everything, never lose it, and never let that some oncologist tell you you're gonna die in two months. They can go to anywhere. Uh so this is it. 100%. Always never give up hope, always keep fighting, fighting, always keep learning.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Yes, yeah, keep trying, keep learning, keep keep pushing, keep exploring, keep, but most of all, keep trying. Yeah, and so the other thing that I have is kind of an ulterior motive, is that I always think that uh somewhere along the way, somebody who has a means to help out research is gonna listen to this and go, oh wow, that's something I'd be willing to invest in, or that's something I'd want to make a donation to. And you have a nonprofit and and you you know are not funded in a traditional way, uh, you don't have big money behind you, you don't have to do is a donation from the patients. Exactly. And so if if if for some chance we were to reach somebody who, you know, maybe some philanthropist, maybe some rich guy who who lost his wife to cancer. I mean, whatever. There's some million rich guy who survived, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:52

All of it cancer uh hits the poor people and it hits the rich people pretty equally. Um it's very equal opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Yeah, yeah. We we talk often about Steve Jobs and how he had all the money in the world, and it wasn't thinking well for a yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

He was he was in La La Land thinking he could do all this crazy stuff, and he had uh he had a very unusual and vicious type of pancreatic cancer, and he ran out of time.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Right, right. So, anyways, again, if if we were to stumble upon somebody who wanted to help you develop, you know, this or any of the uh amazing experimental work you're doing, yeah, this is a way that that they could find out about you.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

So, you know, that's every dollar goes into research, there's no bureaucracy, there's no managers, there's none of that kind of

Research Funding Without Bureaucracy

SPEAKER_01 13:50

crapola. It's all goes to research.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

I love it, I love it. So the second point I wanted to make, and and I think back, I was listening or remembering some of the conversations we had, and Shahiro was actually talking about this as well. I think it was somebody in China that was doing it where they they were getting a live sample of their tumor and sending it off to a lab where they were growing it in a culture, and you sent me a book about that process of growing it in the sponge culture. And I I yeah, I I I spent a bit of time walking through that book. I I have a lot more to learn. There's a lot of information in there, but I I I grabbed onto enough pieces that says, all right, I think I in in some vague general way understand what you guys are doing with with that regard. But I recently stumbled upon an article that was talking about a lab in Greece that was doing a similar thing, and and people were sending a live piece of their tumor tissue to this lab, and then they were taking it and growing it in a culture and then testing out different therapies against that tumor to see which one was going to be more effective at treating it. And in looking at the book that you sent me and some other papers, it seems that it's not necessarily as cut and dry as we'll find a medicine that'll knock it out, so that'll work for you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? You we talked the other day about it, and you were telling me how this was kind of a common thing back in the 70s for a little while, and then a paper came out and said it doesn't work, and then all of a sudden they just stopped. And I was like, wow, how ridiculous is that? Like, what if they did that about rocket engines? You know, oh, it's not gonna work. Okay, well, we just won't do that anymore. I mean, you know, there's so many, so many things that just don't work until they do, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

All right, tell your story. All right, all right. So we we talk about somebody walks into the ER and they have sepsis. Okay. Oh my god, they got an infection in their bloodstream. All right, terrible. Well, what do we do? Yeah, we take a little bit of the blood and we do what's called culture and sensitivity. Okay. We culture the the the whatever is in the blood in a medium in a dish, whatever. We culture it, and then we take a panel of antibiotics, A, B, and C and D, and we see which one is the best one, or which two are the best. Right. And we say to the patient, and maybe we have these data pretty quick, maybe next day, yeah, grow fast, maybe the same day, and we say to

Culture And Sensitivity For Tumors

SPEAKER_01 17:47

the patient, okay, antibiotic A looks pretty good. We're gonna give you antibiotic A. Uh, we're gonna keep you in the hospital overnight, and we're gonna see how good antibiotic A does. And lo and behold, antibiotic A did good, and the patient goes home the next day. Uh all straightforward. Culture the bugs, culture what's in the blood, treat it with a panel of different antibiotics, and see which one may work. Now, there are fortunately there's some really mean, mean machine bacteria that don't respond to the usual antibiotics and the have to do all kinds of tricks to help the patient. But normally the patients they they get a sepsis, they're gonna be okay because the the the almost any hospital can do a culture and sensitivity. So why why we can't do that for cancer? Right. So, and the answer is we can. So uh this goes back a long way. There were a couple of guys in the 50s, I think their name, one guy was Ms. Dr. Black, and another guy was Dr. Spear or whatever, and they were culturing slices of tumors in in the lab, and they stayed alive a long time. And oh boy, that was good. I'm not sure they did any any chemo tests or not, and probably some people did, but when it first caught on with a guy called Sydney Salmon, and of all people, he worked with a lady called Gail Hamburger. Salmon Hamburger, and they were taking tumors and they kind of minced them up into single cells, and they would put them in on auger plates in the lab, and if you didn't do anything bad to them, they would grow as colonies, and you could count the colonies. It was really straightforward. It was called the salmon hamburger clonogenic assay or something like that. You can look it up salmon and hamburger. You like fish or meat, you you got it. So they these folks published their results in about 1978 or so. It was a good year. Uh, they published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine. Now, the New England Journal of Medicine has more authority than the the Old Testament. I mean, it was it's just the ultimate.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

And everybody, oh boy, we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it, and everybody was doing it. And you know, the the it was it's like sheep, and every and so this became extremely popular, the salmon hamburger assay or clonogenic assay. And they would put the chemo in there, and if there were less colonies, that meant the chemo was working. If there weren't less colonies, that chemo wasn't working, and it it made its rounds. And salmon had a younger fella, he was kind of bringing up a guy called Dan von Hoff, who be went on to become maybe the most famous oncologist in the whole cosmos at one time, maybe still he's over 80 now, still going good. So then in about 1983, some guys published another paper also in the New England Journal, and they started nitpicking. Oh, this and this and this, that's wrong, and that's wrong, and this is wrong, and these assays don't work, not science, just say they don't work, and that was the end. Wow, it never recovered. This the salmon and hamburger thing, it never recovered, and you get sort of these rump little labs like us or one in Greece, so we got into it almost 40 years ago. I had a young medical student, Bob Vessio, who's now a very prominent clinician, and Bob was very bright, and we we were working at that time on growing tumors on on what are called sponge gels, uh called gel foam. The the doctors use them as hemostats in the surgery lab surgery clinic, but they're very good to grow. They come from pig skin, and uh, and and it's gelatinized pig skin. And guy called Joe Leighton discovered these are a great way to grow tumors. Joe discovered this in the 50s, and nobody remembers Joe except me, but he was a great, great scientist, Joe. And that book is one of the photos you'll see in a book is a picture of Joe. And so we kinda followed Joe and we learned how to do 3D culture on these sponge gels, gelatinized pig skin called gel foam. And we started treating them with drugs. And our colleagues in Japan did huge

3D Tumor Culture HDRA Evidence

SPEAKER_01 23:22

clinical trials using this technology. We eventually called it the the histiculture drug response assay, HDRA, Histaculture 3D culture. And we found the Japanese clinical trials, there were two very big ones that there was good correlation what happens in the dish, the cancer responding to the drug, and what happens in the patient. Really good, really good. And but that 1983 New England Journal paper hung very heavy. And we were trying to get this established as much as we could in San Diego. And the only time that the docs got interested in it was when another doc got cancer. Then they wanted the sand say. Of course. Of course. When a regular person got cancer, there was no interest because there's extra steps. The pathologist has not to put the whole thing in the pickle juice because that kills it. The formalin, you got to keep some of it alive, because if it's not alive, it's not going to grow. So that was just painful. Nobody wanted to do it.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Theoretically, you could you could schedule a biopsy just specifically for the purpose of gathering that.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

You did this a couple times, Joe, when when the the patient consented and they were desperate to get better information on how to be I would do it a second. Well, but but you you know about it, and and getting this knowledge was really hard. Yeah. Dr. Song remembers me from the 80s going every tumor board, begging, begging, begging, give me tissue, give me tissue. He remembers that, and he thought that's what I wanted when I came over, and actually I just is uh the the little bit of chemo left in the bottle, which we could use in the lab. So we gave up commercializing this, but there was a company in Japan, a kind of lab company, they did it, and they did it for some years, but the Japanese FDA was reimbursing it for less than what it cost them. Oh boy, so they eventually gave it up, and we were lucky that there was a very nice lab and what's in what's called Fukui University on the Japan Sea. They were uh Dr. Sasaki was doing it, and we collaborated with them and eventually recently Dr. Sasaki's great technician she quit, so they can't do it there anymore. So it's come back to us. So we're doing occasional testing for patients in Japan, especially with the one doctor, Dr. Yonimura, who's in his late 70s. He's operating every day on patients nobody else wants to touch. They have perental metastasis, everybody says, go to hospice. He says, I'm gonna try to help you. Yeah, we need more of him. And and so we're doing we're taking over for from Fukua University and doing the testing for them, those patients, Dr. Yoni Moore's patients. It's a small group, but these are people who have not no recourse. They have some of them are going on methionase, which is good. They failed all the first line, second line, third line, chemo, whatever. They end up with peritoneal metastasis, and and the knee-jerk reaction to all those patients is just go to hospice. But Yonimura he operates on. And some of the tissue that he gets were uh we used to go to the university now coming back to us at comes by FedEx from Japan, but still good. So we're we're back doing this on a small scale. But that's all it is, and you ask 10,000 oncologists, are you gonna do anything like this? And 9,999 are gonna say, Are you kidding me? Uh they don't want anything to do with it, it's extra work, and somehow that 1983 New England Journal of Medicine paper, even though most of these guys weren't even born then, they they it's in the DNA of oncology. This doesn't work. So that's where we are, Joe, and it's it's not gonna spread. If we we're we can help if patients were happy to do it within our very limited uh you know staff everything.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Well, once again, I'm gonna you know throw that out there. That this is another thing. When I heard about it, I mean I know it's not an exact bulletproof science because just because something happens in a in a lab setting doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna work in the gotta do the clinical trial, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

And we did the trials in that new paper from China that I just sent you. Yeah, in this assay, they did they compared their lab results with the HDRA with the clinical outcome and got very good correlation. Yeah. And maybe this will start spreading in China. A lot of new things are spreading in China, and it's good,

Guidelines, Incentives, And Tumor Board Guessing

SPEAKER_01 29:08

but it's not gonna spread here. No way.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

You know, it's it's it's troubling. I I realize like we talk about it a lot. There's a lot of people that are you know into natural answers and they think there's some big conspiracy with the pharma companies and the doctors, and you know, we don't believe that. I don't believe that, but when you think about something like this, you go, why in the hell wouldn't they just put some energy at something that would likely work and probably would not do any harm?

SPEAKER_01 29:39

Because the 1983 New England Journal Paper said it doesn't work, right? That's gonna be that's gonna be ingrained in stone for I don't know how many more hundred years. It doesn't work, and it's extra work, and who's gonna pay for it? Right, right. Why do I need to do this? I have my guidelines. My guidelines tell me what's first line, what's second line, what's third line. Why do I have to mess with the guidelines? I'm not gonna mess with the guidelines, I'm gonna get in trouble. Exactly. You know, I work for slow kettering, and I make a lot of money in slow kettering. There you go. Guidelines, that's what they say over there. Right, right. Nobody, nobody's interested. First, the New England Journal says it doesn't work. The the our clinical trials we did in Japan were exquisite. The patients, it was beautiful correlation, and this new, brand, brand new paper out of China, which I sent to you, and you can to all your all your listeners, it's so promising. And surprise, surprise, we showed it was promising with these clinical trials we did were in the 90s, Joe. The early 90s, and they were published in a good journal like the clinical cancer research. Right. Oh no, no, no. But back then it could. So there's no conspiracy, it's ignorance, it's uh misinformation, it's disinformation.

SPEAKER_00 31:13

You don't need a conspiracy, it's already you said before, who's gonna pay for it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

You know, I mean you don't need a conspiracy, it's already dead. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

Well, like I said, I think if we can solve the who's gonna pay for it problem. So here's here's here's uh even the who's gonna pay for it.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

Who's what doc is gonna order it? Right, right, right. That's true. Right. The surgeon has to do something extra, the pathologist has to do something extra. The oncologist has to read the results and has to decide am I gonna do that or am I gonna do the guidelines? So, you know, you get a bacterial infection, it's so natural. Right. Come on in, we'll take care of you, be out of the hospital in a couple days. Culture and sensitivity. The same principle works. You can grow tumors, you can culture tumors, you can sensitivity, you can do it.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

But nobody wants to do it. We talk about this a lot that you know, as as this show's growing, as my voice is reaching more people, more people are finding me. I have a new client that reached out to me today. She's got ovarian cancer and wants to talk about what I know. We're gonna we have an appointment to talk tomorrow. Obviously, I'm gonna talk to her about you know, the the the diet and the enzyme and and and all these other things. But I'm also gonna talk to her about the call. And I think that for anybody who wants to learn about this, like who knows?

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Maybe there's somebody gonna listen to this that's got just on a small scale, Joe. We'll have to recover our own costs. We'll discuss that another time.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

But if just the right person was listening to this and and was was told that they're inoperable, that they're gonna die, they got hospice. That that happens one million times a year. Wait a minute, I've got enough money to keep to try everything I could. They literally could hop on that call and have a conversation with us and possibly find their way to solving it this way, at least at least a chance, and that's we're out there ability, my honest feeling we can help people, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:40

You know, with within our capacity. Let me tell you a story, Joe. Sure. Horror story. All right. So uh most of the bigger hospitals have what are called tumor boards, okay. Yeah, yeah. And I I don't know if they're open, if they're not open, they can sneak in, it's no big deal. Just pretend you're a doc. And then they discuss some cases. Right. Here's how it goes. Oh, I think we should use this drug. Oh no, another guy. No, no, no, no. We should use that drug, another guy or girl. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We try this drug. Are you kidding me? That's the way it goes, Joe. That's what happens to the tumor boards. Okay, these are people maybe the ones that make it to the board are have very advanced disease, they've gone through the first, second line of chemo, maybe more, whatever. And that's the conversation. Oh, this one. No, no, no, no, no, that one. Absolutely, just guess madness.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

And here we are. This is what year is this now? 2026 or something?

SPEAKER_02 34:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

It's like it's and and these most of these folks at some point or another probably had a surgery. There could have been some tissue left over for culture and sensitivity. Sure. So that's the way it is. It's and and the guessing between the various docs at the tumor board can be so radically different. What's what's the right guess? And by the time, you know, I mean, how many times can we try? Because we probably have only a little bit of time left unless we get something working.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

So you know what? To contrast that, when I was in a situation where I needed to do something quick because my tumor was going to kill me pretty fast. You and I sat together. First line. Yes. But you and I sat together. We both went down and researched. We both got back and we talked about it looks like these three drugs together could do the job. We both went back and looked again and agreed that that seems like a good solution. And I went to my doctor and I said, Hey, will you do this for me? That's a big stark contrast to throwing it up to a tumor board and and and hoping that they come back with some idea. And but it would have come up with nothing.

SPEAKER_01 36:12

So we were we were lucky, we came up with a good guess. Yeah. And that that nice lady at UC Irvine agreed to do it. Right. We were we were we were lucky. A lot of people aren't so lucky. Right. You know, that's the way it is, Joe. That's the way it is. Oi. You know, it's the level of science of cancer treatment and cancer research, the scientific level is low.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

It seems that way.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

The more I learn, the more I and these guys go around the leaders, the opinion leaders frutting around and getting all prizes and money, and and and they're full of it.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Well, and and not only that, but when you go into a cancer center, like when I was at UCI, you're going into a pretty fancy place, and it's got all the big technology, and you got these robots and and and scanners and and bells and whistles, and everything's just seems like you're literally in the leading edge of science.

SPEAKER_01 37:23

You seem to be the scanners, and that that's really great science, great unbelievable, so good, that's very high tech.

SPEAKER_00 37:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

And the engineers who made all that are first rate.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:39

But the average oncologist or the average cancer researcher, even the fancy cancer researcher, not so good.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

No, I'm getting that. Well, Robert, as always, this has been a fascinating exploration. I feel like in some small way I'm I'm walking with you in your research, and I'm learning as I'm going. I'm trying to, you know, dig a little bit deeper. You send me research materials to read, and I'm I'm learning a little bit along the way. So when you tell me a reference to something, I understand a little bit more about what it is and how it works. And, you know, I hope to God I go through the rest of my life and never have another tumor. And it's possible that I will with the steps I'm taking. But if I do, I know that exactly what the next move is. I've I've already plotting my course to where if if something shows up on a test and it's not right, I already have my next move set, not starting from scratch and and losing months of time where that thing keeps growing and and and getting stronger. No way. I'm I'm I'm preliminarily ready to ready to shoot before it turns into anything. So I appreciate you know you, your direction and your your guidance and your persistence. You've got that same spirit that I have of just never give up. You keep on going and you keep on going and then you keep on going some more. There's no such thing. Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 39:11

Well, Robert, no, I just want to say if some listeners are here and they're you know they're gonna have maybe a surgery and they can get their hospital degree to agree to get some tumor tissue, we can try to help them. They can if you if you if you go to PubMed Hoffman RM you look under three-dimensional culture or histocultural drug response assay, or you'll see a ton of papers, tons of papers on PubMed that we've published since 1987, 86 on this topic. 40 years. Wow, that's a long time. It's a long time, and you know, if if

How Patients Can Get Tissue Tested

SPEAKER_01 40:04

and all this can be automated, it's there, it's there. And we've shown by a clinical trial we we have good correlation with the tumor growing in 3D culture and being treated by drugs and the clin and clinical output. It's there, works, as you say. Is it perfect? No, but it the patients who, as the Chinese paper says, the patients who are treated by the results of the HDRA assay, in total, do better than those that are not. That doesn't mean it's dependent. But if you take the pay, all the patients together, they do better, and they do significantly better with regard to the most important thing, which is called disease-free survival.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

There you go. Right there. Surviving without the thing coming back. That's that's where I currently exist.

SPEAKER_01 40:55

That they have a statistical significance of doing better. Read the Chinese paper.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

It's really absolutely and you know, realistically, even if the only thing it told you was was what wasn't gonna work, it would still avoid people getting tremendous information.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

Exactly. The toxic chemicals that don't work to avoid them. Oh boy, that's invaluable, Joe.

SPEAKER_00 41:24

Invaluable. Exactly. All right, Robert. Well, as always, this has been joy to spend this time talking with you, and we'll get back at it again sooner than later. You're the number one cancer patient in the world. I love it. I am to me, that's for sure. And I look forward to talking with you on on Sunday. If this um, it's my honor. Yeah, and this if this consultation tomorrow goes well and she's receptive, I'll I'll send her your way and we'll go from there. Well, we should talk on the Zoom. We need to, you know, yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

Exactly, exactly. I'm gonna leave you with one horror story. All right. Back in the 80s, this patient, we had everything, everything arranged for her. She had colon cancer, everything arranged, and the operating room that curse word, the idiots, put the tumor and formula. Ah I I you know, I mean, the all the things that can Murphy's laws, there, all of it, everything, yeah, all these things that need to be overcome. Wow, it's crazy. If you put enough money in, if the hospital got enough money to do it, the doc the doc got money to do it for his or her pocket, that will help.

SPEAKER_00 42:50

Exactly. Well, we're we're we're working at solving all those problems. Joe, I want you to do some homework. All right.org.

SPEAKER_01 43:02

Okay, I will. And then we can talk about that. He a lot of things we're talking about today, he can talk about much better.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Sounds good. I will bring my findings to the call on Sunday. Okay. Awesome. All right, Robert. Well, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you. With you too. This has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and I want to thank all of our listeners for making this show possible. And we will see you next time. You bet.

unknown 43:30

Thank you.