Learn More About Our Treatment and Mission

Immunocine certainly does not provide the only Immunotherapy based on Dendritic Cells. With that being said, Immunocine’s Treatment is the only Dendritic Cell Treatment to properly activate the Immune System, which leads to an aggressive attack against a patient’s cancer.

Even including other cancer treatments beyond Dendritic Cell Treatments, our treatment is the only treatment to stimulate a TH1 High Response against a patient’s cancer cells.

This is the same response generated during a viral infection and corresponds with the rapid activation of specific immune cells capable of destroying any targeted cell in the body. Our Team does this through a patented process that effectively “Double Loads” the Dendritic Cell, in a very similar manner to an invading virus.

In a viral response, your body’s primary defense is to destroy the virally infected cells before they infect other cells. Instead of targeting the virally infected cells in your body, our treatment enacts the same response but instead targets the cancer cells.

Other than the FDA Clinical Trials for Glioblastoma and Pancreatic Cancer, Immunocine is the only treatment center where you can receive this proprietary Dendritic Cell Therapy.

Dendritic Cell Loading Immunocine’s Treatment uses a patent-protected Double Loading technique to educate the patient’s Dendritic Cells with the patient’s unique cancer markers. In comparison, other Dendritic Cell Treatments only load a patient’s Dendritic Cells in a singular manner, either internally or externally.

Peer-reviewed research has proven time and time again that Double Loading is the only known way to fully activate a Th1 immune response, which is necessary to engage a patient’s Killer T cells to destroy the cancer cells. In comparison, single loading only generates a limited immune response.

Treatment Administration – Immunocine’s Treatment is one of the few treatments that use an Interventional Radiologist to administer the treatment via an ultrasound-guided injection. The Interventional Radiologist targets the injection as close as possible to the patient’s lymph node closest to their tumor.

This step is also essential to ensure the Dendritic Cells immediately start activating an immune response. Other Dendritic Cell Treatments rely on intramuscular injection or IV infusion which will delay treatment onset and risk the Dendritic Cells not fully activating the Immune System.

Absolutely. There are more than a dozen peer-reviewed publications specific to Immunocine’s protocol. This research started in 2006 and continues to this day through various groups within the Texas Medical Center.

We would be more than happy to share the specific publications with any patient or referring physician interested in learning more

Spread over the course of six weeks, the Immunocine Dendritic Cell Treatment (IDCT) is a unique and comprehensive Immunotherapy solely focused on activating a natural and aggressive immune response against our patient’s cancer.

While some patients choose to stay in Cancun for all six weeks, many patients split their stay into two trips. As there are extended periods of downtime to allow the Immune System to respond to the treatment, many patients will come to Cancun for two weeks to start the treatment and return for a two-week trip to complete the treatment.

For the Immunocine Treatment, patients will typically experience the effects of an immune response no different than when they are fighting a cold or the flu. This can include fatigue, fever, aches, swollen lymph nodes, and loss of appetite.

Patients with tumors in sensitive locations or in their bones may also feel a varying level of soreness at the tumor sites as a result of the immune response.

Fortunately, these symptoms will reduce over time and will disappear once the patient’s cancer has been eliminated. Furthermore, these symptoms are only the result of the Immune System attacking the patient’s cancer and are a positive sign that the treatment is working.

The entire cost of our treatment is approximately $97,000, which includes everything related to the medical treatment and intra-Cancun transportation for your treatments.

We know that this is a price that may not be accessible to many patients. Unfortunately, each treatment is personalized to every patient and takes over a week to develop in our cGMP laboratory. Without cutting any corners, our team has tried to make the treatment as affordable as possible.

While Immunocine does not offer treatment financing directly, our team has partnered with two companies to work with prospective Immunocine patients. If you have any interest in pursuing these options, please let us know.

LightStream Medical Financing – LightStream guarantees the lowest interest rate on Medical Financing. You can choose to pay the loan back in 3 – 7 years with payments lower than $1,300 per month. Your approval does not require any collateral and can be determined in as little as 5 days.

Life Credit – Life Credit will allow you to borrow up to 50% against your life insurance. This allows you to keep your life insurance and any associated benefits.

Yes, and we encourage these discussions! While not a requirement, almost all of our former patients have volunteered to speak with prospective patients considering our treatment.

Once you complete the Preliminary Medical Evaluation to determine your eligibility, our team will be more than happy to connect you with a treated patient of ours.

To start the Medical Evaluation, one of Immunocine’s Patient Coordinators will provide you with an online Medical Questionnaire and HIPPA Authorization to complete. Once these are completed, one of our Patient Coordinators will work with you to collect your medical records to start the Preliminary Medical Evaluation.

Once the patient has passed the Preliminary Medical Evaluation, their records are then reviewed by the larger Medical Team, which includes our Oncologist, Radiologist, and Hematologist. During the Final Medical Evaluation, our team will be doing a deeper review of your records and also developing our treatment strategy for the patient.

We complete this process in roughly ten days once we have received all medical records. If approved for treatment, one of our Patient Coordinators will soon be calling to share the good news!

If treatment is declined, a member of our Medical Team will reach out to explain the rationale for the decision and any recommendations they have for future treatment options outside of Immunocine.

Patients with a Solid Tumor – At this time, Immunocine only treats patients with solid tumors that are able to be biopsied by our Medical Team. Unfortunately, blood malignancies such as Leukemia are not currently treated.

Travel to Cancun, Mexico – Our Treatment Protocol must be administered in Cancun, Mexico. Unfortunately, if you are unable to travel to Cancun, you will not be able to receive treatment.

Stable Immune System – For our Immunotherapy to be successful, a patient needs to have a stable, functioning Immune System. Patients with immune deficiencies may not qualify for treatment until normal activity is restored.

Treatment for Six Weeks – Immunocine’s Treatment Protocol takes place over 6 weeks. Patients can either choose to stay in Cancun for all 6 weeks or visit Cancun twice for 2 weeks at a time.

Prognosis Greater than 3 Months – While our treatment has seen success where other treatments have not, our treatment takes time to work fully. Patients with a prognosis of fewer than 3 months may not achieve desired results in such a short amount of time.

Absolutely! The Immunocine Team consists of two dedicated Patient Coordinators to assist with organizing your travel to Cancun and any other needs while you are with us.

Once you are approved for treatment, our team will reach out to answer any travel questions that you may have. In addition, our team is very well-versed in the Cancun area and can provide recommendations on where to stay based on your preferences and needs.

Once in Cancun, all transportation within Cancun will already be arranged with a private driver. You will not need to worry about renting a car or coordinating any logistics for your appointments.

Yes, our team can organize a dedicated nurse to assist you during your treatment. From helping with daily needs to coordinating with our Medical Team, our team can connect you with nursing services that will ensure that you feel taken care of at all times.

As a note, nursing services are provided at an additional cost and are dependent on the patient’s specific needs. If this is an option you would like to explore, please let us know, and we can provide general cost estimates.

Our Medical Team recommends suspending any other specific cancer treatments during the six weeks patients will be receiving Immunocine’s Treatment. While other Immunotherapies may be complementary to Immunocine’s Treatment, interactions between our treatment and another may not be fully understood.

The interactions between treatments may overwhelm the Immune System or may not even be necessary upon completion of our treatment.

The Immunocine Team consists of a Medical Team, a Science Team, and a Patient Support Team.

Medical Team – Led by Immunocine’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Alberto Ortiz, Immunocine’s Medical Team consists of experienced physicians in Oncology, Interventional Radiology, and Hematology. This complete Medical Team ensures that all patients are evaluated thoroughly and receive the highest level of care upon arriving in Cancun.

Science Team – Led by Matthew Halpert, PhD, and Susana Hernandez, MSc, the Science Team consists of cancer immunologists, molecular biologists, and clinical chemists. This team is responsible for creating and exceeding the quality standards for each personalized Dendritic Cell Treatment.

Patient Support Team – Led by Nicole Verrico, the Patient Support Team is responsible for addressing any questions or needs of our patients before, during, and after our treatment. From helping collect medical records to organizing your travel to Cancun, the Patient Support Team makes sure every patient is able to focus on their treatment and getting better.

The Immunocine Dendritic Cell technology and protocol are extremely detailed and fine-tuned. This requires considerably more care and effort than other “standard” Dendritic Cell techniques or Immunotherapies.

As a result of the extensive scientific understanding and training involved, it is a difficult process to outsource and ensure the kind of quality we expect at Immunocine.

Therefore, this treatment is currently limited to the teams overseeing the US FDA clinical trials and our team of doctors and scientists in Cancun. As the protocol moves through the FDA approval system and becomes more widespread, the treatment will become more readily available in different locations.

Although Immunocine’s treatment protocol has been researched since 2006, it has lived in research laboratories and now clinical trials. Immunocine represents the first opportunity for patients all over the world to access this treatment protocol, no matter their cancer type.

With that being said, our team does not expect it will be much longer until our treatment becomes much more popular as the clinical trials progress. Additional trials have been recently opened and will start enrollment in the coming future.

Unlike other cancer treatments, Immunocine relies on a completely natural and targeted immune response against your collected tumor cells. This immune response relies on the specific genetic makeup of the threat, which makes it agnostic to specific cancer mutations or locations.

No different than being able to recognize foreign viruses and attack them, our bodies can do the same with your cancer cells.

Preclinical studies on the Immunocine Treatment have demonstrated immune responses against 100+ different targets and counting. To date, there does not appear to be a specific genetic mutation or tissue type that renders the immune response impotent.

In looking for a potential site to open Immunocine, Dr. Halpert spent an extensive amount of time looking at a variety of cities and countries to start providing treatment to patients. This research led to Cancun being distinctively better than all other locations considered.

Cancun is a sophisticated city as a result of its large tourism industry. In addition, it has an extensive medical network that is centered around the world-renowned Amerimed Hospital, which is internationally accredited and one of the most advanced hospitals in the world.

Our Medical Team is staffed with board-certified physicians, including oncologists, interventional radiologists, hematologists, and general practitioners. There is no greater priority to the Immunocine team than your care.

Furthermore, our partnership with the private, internationally accredited Galenia Hospital ensures every patient is always within a short drive to a well-staffed, well-equipped, well-maintained medical institution if needed. In the event emergent care is required, Immunocine will make sure you are promptly taken care of.

Once a patient’s treatment is complete, they will receive a full treatment summary and have access to all data and images collected. They will also have our best, good-faith interpretations of the collected data in regard to the success of their treatment.

Our Team will continue to review future medical reports, follow their progress, and offer any assistance we can. This includes collaborating on the next steps with a patient’s primary doctors, which we highly encourage.

Continually Evolving – Cancer cells, by nature, are mutations with no limit on continued differentiation from normal cells. This may limit certain treatments to only be successful on parts of the tumor. This also results in once-effective treatments no longer generating any efficacy.

Immunosuppressant – The mutated cells that comprise a tumor have already escaped detection by the Immune System. Cancer cells can go further and even actively suppress immune activity by releasing certain compounds or presenting specific surface markers to turn down an immune response.

Aggressive Growth – Certain cancers demonstrate an aggressive growth that simply can outrun a treatment’s progress, especially treatments that are not specifically attacking the cancer.

Targets Multiple Cell Variations – Instead of focusing on a specific characteristic, Immunocine’s Treatment samples the entire tumor and, therefore, can target multiple variations and components of the tumor.

Initiates a Complete Immune Response – Dendritic Cells have the ability to initiate a complete immune response. As this is initially triggered in Immunocine’s Laboratory, our treatment avoids Immunosuppressant behavior, such as limiting Dendritic Cell maturation.

Aggressive Response – Upon the first Dendritic Cell Injection, your body will start activating Killer T cells to seek and destroy the cancer cells throughout your body. Your body will do this quickly, no different than when it activates Killer T cells to stop a viral infection from spreading.

The Immune System is widely known for its ability to fight off foreign threats such as bacteria and viruses. Many people do not know it also is responsible for destroying mutated and damaged cells.

Through a variety of methods, Immunotherapy treatments leverage this natural ability to destroy cancer cells in a much safer and more effective way.

In comparison, conventional cancer treatments do not use the Immune System. Instead, the majority provide untargeted treatments that hopefully destroy the cancer faster than it destroys healthy cells.

While there are new Immunotherapies being discovered each year, the majority of Immunotherapy Treatments fall into the following categories.

Checkpoint Inhibitors – Cancer cells can express proteins that are normally used to stop an immune response.

Checkpoint Inhibitors block these proteins and therefore allow the Immune System to detect the cancerous cells. Checkpoint Inhibitors also allow for the Immune System to continue functioning longer.

While Checkpoint Inhibitors are easy to administer, they are limited in that they are not often curative for advanced cancers and typically combined with treatments like Chemotherapy.

CAR-T cell Therapy – Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy genetically modifies a patient’s T cells in the laboratory to specifically target a unique marker on cancer cells. These cells are then infused back into the patient for treatment.

CAR-T cell therapies are used to treat blood malignancies like Leukemia, as they have mostly lacked success in targeting solid tumors.

Monoclonal Antibodies – Antibodies circulate through the body and attach themselves to cancer cells. Once attached to the antigen, antibodies recruit other immune cells to try and destroy the cancerous cells.

Unfortunately, this approach has been repeatedly attempted with generally underwhelming results.

Dendritic Cell Treatments – Dendritic Cells Treatments use a patient’s own Dendritic Cells to target an immune response against cancer. These treatments are usually accompanied by the sampling of a patient’s tumor to provide a target for the Dendritic Cells.

Due to the tumor sampling and Dendritic Cell extraction, Dendritic Cell Treatments represent one of the more complicated and expensive Immunotherapies.

Immunological Memory is the ability of the Immune System to respond faster and more effectively against threats that have already been encountered. For cancer patients, Immunological Memory would dramatically reduce the likelihood of relapse once a patient’s cancer has been eliminated.

Immunocine’s Treatment is one of the few Immunotherapies that has successfully demonstrated the creation of Immunological Memory. This is the result of initiating of complete immune response via Dendritic Cells as opposed to “short cutting” an immune response with medications to boost the Immune System or genetically modified immune cells that are not able to initiate memory cells.

The Immunocine Team is often asked to evaluate alternative cancer treatments that are not specific to cancer. These treatments include specialized diets, Ozone Therapy, Vitamin Infusions, and Phototherapy. Unfortunately, most of these treatments lack any legitimate research demonstrating success and are often supported by anecdotal reports.

Besides treatments like coffee enemas that have specifically been demonstrated to make certain cancers progress faster, the majority of these treatments will certainly not make matters worse.

However, our team has yet to find conclusive evidence that these Alternative Treatments can actually eliminate cancer consistently and repeatedly. This is not due to a lack of trying. There are currently 3,000 different clinical trials focused on Fasting alone.

The reality is that cancer is incredibly difficult to treat and often does not allow for endless attempts to find a treatment that is effective. While there is a possibility a patient could see an Alternative Treatment cure them, the majority of patients will most likely not see that success. Therefore, Alternative Treatments represent quite a large gamble for patients that have limited time to effectively treat their cancer.