Cancer Advisor

Quick Answer Dr. Thomas Seyfried , a biologist at Boston College, argues that cancer is primarily a mitochondrial metabolic disease rather than a genetic one. His core treatment framework — the Press-Pulse protocol — pairs a therapeutic ketogenic diet that restricts glucose and glutamine (the "press") with pulsed adjuncts like glutaminase-inhibiting drugs, hyperbaric oxygen, or fasting (the "pulse"). Mechanistic and preclinical evidence is strong; human evidence is a mix of promising case reports and small, mostly inconclusive trials — including a 2026 randomized pancreatic cancer trial that showed a survival trend without reaching statistical significance. Most integrative oncologists treat metabolic therapy as a physician-supervised adjunct to, not a replacement for, standard cancer care. In This Guide Who Is Thomas Seyfried? The Case Against Standard-of-Care Statistics Diet and Cancer: Why Food Isn't Neutral Cutting Off Cancer's Fu...

PD-1 and PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitors can produce remarkably durable responses in some patients. However, resistance remains one of the central challenges in modern oncology. A tumor may never respond to immunotherapy in the first place, or it may respond initially and later progress. The reason is important: blocking PD-1 or PD-L1 removes one immune-suppressive signal, but it does not guarantee that the immune system can recognize, enter, survive within, and destroy every cancer cell. This article explains the major biological mechanisms behind primary and acquired immunotherapy resistance , why PD-L1 alone cannot reliably predict response, how tumor evolution and the tumor microenvironment contribute to treatment failure, and what strategies researchers and oncologists are investigating to overcome resistance. Bottom line: PD-1/PD-L1 resistance is not a single disease mechanism. It is a systems problem involving tumor genetics, antigen presentation, T-cell function...