⏳ 00:00 – Dendritic Cell Vaccine: A Breakthrough in Immunotherapy
⏳ 00:22 – Welcome and Guest Introduction
⏳ 01:15 – Meet Dr. Francisco Contreras
⏳ 02:19 – The Soul of Oasis of Hope
⏳ 02:55 – Integrative Cancer Treatments at Oasis of Hope
⏳ 06:21 – Nutritional Support in Cancer Therapy
⏳ 07:44 – Cutting-Edge Immunotherapy: Dendritic Cell Vaccine
⏳ 09:42 – Patient Experience at Oasis of Hope
⏳ 13:41 – The 2025 Beljanski Integrative Cancer Conference
⏳ 21:21 – The Future of Cancer Immunotherapy and Vision

Introduction to Dendritic Cell Vaccine

Dr. Francisco Contreras: The dendritic cell vaccine is a very personalized therapy, so we prepare a vaccine to our patients from their own tumors or circulating tumor cells very, very effectively.

Welcome and Guest Introduction

Victor Dwyer: Welcome to today’s episode of The Beljanski Cancer Talk Show. We’re honored to be joined by the incredible Dr. Francisco.

As the President and Chairman of the Oasis of Hope Hospital, Dr. Francisco is reshaping cancer care by blending the best conventional medicine with alternative therapies, and always with a focus on emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

With a surgical oncology background from the University of Vienna and years of groundbreaking work, Dr. Francisco has written 15 books on integrative therapies, and spoken at the top medical conferences around the world.

Get ready for a transformative conversation that will completely shift the way you think about cancer treatment and healing.

Meet Dr. Francisco Contreras

Sylvie Beljanski: Hello, Dr. Francisco Contreras. I’m delighted to have you today on The Beljanski Cancer Talk Show. I’m so impressed that you made the time to join me on my podcast because I do remember you from 20 years ago when I visited the clinic Oasis of Hope. It was at the end of a conference that I attended called the Cancer Control Society in Los Angeles, and at the end of the conference, there was opportunity to visit a number of so-called Mexico Cancer Clinic, and you were one of the prominent one not to miss. And it was the very beginning for me to be in the realm of cancer, of integrative cancer. And I was really impressed with your clinic. I do remember the visit and you. Thank you again for joining me today. 

I said that I visited Oasis of Hope 20 years ago, but Oasis of Hope has been around for much longer than that. 

The Soul of Oasis of Hope

Dr. Francisco Contreras: We celebrated our 61st year since the inception in 1963 when my father started this. I call it ministry because we like to minister to, to patients.

I want to thank you. It’s an honor to be with you and I hope that we can provide very interesting and useful information to your audience, your big audience. 

Sylvie Beljanski: I am sure. Thank you. Why Oasis of hope? What is it difference? Where is it located and why would people go to that place to receive cancer treatment? 

Integrative Cancer Treatments at Oasis of Hope

Dr. Francisco Contreras: The Oasis is located in Tijuana, Mexico. Playas is in Tijuana, Mexico very close to San Diego so that you can, more or less, imagine where it is. What separates us from most oncological centers around the world is our philosophy is based on two pillars.

First, what Hippocrates, the father of medicine said, he said, “First, do no harm,” and we translate that into whatever we’re going to offer the patient has to improve their quality of life and, unfortunately, cancer treatments generally destroy the quality of life of a patient.

The second pillar is what Jesus said. He said, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” so we say love your patient as you love yourself. The translation of that is that we should only offer our patients something that I would take myself. That, to me, is loving a patient as I love myself. So, we design our therapies based on that. Is it something that I would take myself if I were in the patient’s shoes and is it a protocol that is going to improve the quality of life of the patient? Not only destroy the tumor, because chemotherapy and radiation therapy destroyed tumors, but they generally are very bad for the patient as well. Many patients do not survive very long with that type of therapy. I think that philosophical basis separates us from most of the oncological centers around the world.

And thirdly, we want to practice the best medicine possible. We don’t want to practice alternative medicine or conventional medicine. We want to offer everything that is the best for the patient in that situation. Whenever we feel that conventional therapy is the best for the patient, that’s what we’re going to do, or surgery, for instance, as well. For instance, lymphomas, in general, have a very high response to chemotherapy, like 95% cure rate.

In that case, I’m going to offer a patient what is the best for that patient and we combine it with natural elements so that the patients can tolerate better the chemotherapy, and suffer less from the chemotherapy while there on the chemotherapy. We are more of an integrative cancer center than an alternative cancer center.

We will offer our patients whatever we feel is the best from the conventional or from the alternative. On the flip side, a non-small cell or small cell lung carcinoma where chemotherapy is just devastating to the patient, we’re not going to offer them any conventional therapy because natural therapies are much better.

Our five-year survival rate is about 20 times better than with conventional therapies, so it will depend on the case. Early stages, for instance, surgery is the best option for a cancer in stage 1 or 2. For any type of cancer, when surgery is possible, that’s gonna be the best. But in stage 4 cancers, usually, alternative therapies are going to be much better for most patients, in general.

Nutritional Support in Cancer Therapy

Sylvie Beljanski: And I am sure that you’re also offering some nutritional support to compensate with the toxicity of conventional therapies when you are using them, right? 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yes. Diet is a major part of our therapy. Not as a side plate. It’s a major part. It’s been well known for many years that a low glycemic, plant-based diet is the best diet for our cancer patient.

We have worked with our diet a lot because diet is very emotional. When a patient is first diagnosed, they usually say, “If I only have to eat green beans for the rest of my life, that’s all I’m going to eat.” And then three months later, “If this is all I have to eat I’d rather die.”

We have a very good diet where nutritionists, doctors and chefs have worked together to provide a diet that is doable for patients, that it’s enjoyable even. 

It’s extremely important. In clinical trials that, that we revised through the years, the common denominating factor of the long-term survivors is that they kept their diet. Again, diet is a major part of our overall treatment program. 

Cutting-Edge Immunotherapy: Dendritic Cell Vaccine Explained

Sylvie Beljanski: You also are offering some really cutting-edge treatments, some vaccines that you have developed. Can you tell us more about that? 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yes. We have been working now for over 10 years on immunotherapy based on dendritic cells. We’ve developed a number of programs for patients with advanced cancers and even not so advanced because it’s been so effective.

Our dendritic cell vaccine is a very personalized therapy. We prepare a vaccine to our patients from their own tumors or circulating tumor cells very, very effectively. Within the immune system, we create an anti-tumor task force very specific for that patient and very specific for that patient’s tumor. It has improved our results significantly since we started doing dendritic cell vaccines.

We have our own lab. It’s a very sophisticated lab where we prepare the vaccines for each patient. We are very, very excited about the future of immunotherapy based on dendritic cells. Over the years, our therapies, immunotherapies have evolved significantly. Our results are very encouraging.

Sylvie Beljanski: What kind of cancer respond the best to this vaccine treatment? 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Most cancers will respond, but there’s no question that breast cancer patients have the best results. Ovarian the second, lung the third, colon the fourth. They’re very common malignancies where we have had very good results. Our very close fifth are head and neck carcinomas. All squamous cell carcinomas of the tonsil, the pharynx respond very well to this therapy as well. 

Patient Experience at Oasis of Hope

Victor Dwyer: One thing I wanted to ask is, like, what exactly does someone expect by going there?

So, I understand, like, changing the diet, getting therapies, but, like, if there was a new patient that you would take in, what exactly is their life going to be like, in a way? Are they like, are like, are they gonna be in a spa day? Like, like what, what exactly is their life once they enter the Oasis?

Dr. Francisco Contreras: That’s a very good question because we’ve worked over the years for many, many years to create an environment that does not look like a hospital, even though we are a hospital. So, for instance, our hospital rooms look a lot more like a hotel room. In fact, whenever we can, we like our patients not to be in a hospital environment.

The treatment room is a very happy place in comparison to most chemotherapy wards, which is gloom and doom, and the patient’s vomiting and feeling terrible. We have a whole program, educational program for our patients. For just about every day, at least, we spend a day educating our patients on cancer, on nutrition, on immunology, on quality of life, on supplementation, how they can live a better life longer.

Because we’re Christian-based, we have a devotional every day where the patients enjoy singing, praying, reading the Bible. Of course, we respect any, any patient regardless of their beliefs. They still have a good time. Even atheists have had a good time, you know, just singing. We spend a good time with our patients trying to be jovial with jokes and laughter therapy, things like that. So, the patients will spend in therapy every day about 4 hours where all the infusions are given, then they spend a lot of time in the dining room. We create an environment for them to chat, to enjoy time together, to share their stories, sad and happy.

So, the patients are very involved emotionally with each other. And we believe that that makes a big difference in how a patient will respond. It’s basically a happy place. The reason we call it the Oasis of Hope was, actually, a patient gave us that name. A patient that came from Italy, a sculptor.

And I remember him he was given six months to live in Italy, came here, and 5 years later, he comes back with a very beautiful sculpture that we still have on our patio, and as a present to my father, and said he said to my dad, “I’m giving you this because this is an oasis of hope.”

Since then, we call it the Oasis of hope. We want to create this hope environment because for most cancer patient, everything is just gloom and doom. I believe that a positive attitude changes everything.

Sylvie Beljanski: How long do they stay with you generally, your patients? 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Between 14 and 21 days, depending on their diagnosis and depending on how aggressive their cancers are.

Sylvie Beljanski: So, after 2-3 weeks, they are going home with… 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Home with a very comprehensive home therapy and all of the patients, we want to see them back in three months. And depending on the results, we will adjust the therapy and then decide whether we wanna see them again in 3 months or in 6 months or in a year.

Sylvie Beljanski: Okay. So there, there is a real follow up. 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yes. We have a very strong follow up program. We’re very diligent in contacting our patients. We have some scheduled calls, but our patients can call us any day, whatever problems they have, we’re very good at keeping in touch with the patients because it’s a, cancer is just scary and so we want to be just a phone call away from them.

The 2025 Beljanski Integrative Cancer Conference

Nathan Crane: That’s the purpose of the 2025 Beljanski Integrative Cancer Conference, a meeting of the world’s top minds in complementary, alternative, natural and integrative cancer solutions. The proceeds go towards funding, cutting-edge cancer research, delving into a brand new area of science concerning cancer stem cells, which could hold the secret to ending cancer once and for all.

Victor Dwyer: Can you do your therapy and the conventional therapy at the same time, or?

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yes. In most cases, yes. When we give the vaccine though, for a period of three weeks, we don’t want any therapy that can destroy those cells that we give back. And it usually takes about 3 weeks for the cells that are cultured in a lab to really come back home and not be destroyed by chemo or some other anti-proliferative protocol.

But in, in general, yes, we can combine conventional therapies with our protocol very well, and it helps the patient that’s, let’s say, with chemotherapy or radiation. The tolerance is much better when they combine it and the response is much better when they combine. 

Sylvie Beljanski: Could you tell me more? I would like to go back to this, what you are doing, this vaccine, which, because this is really pretty, seems to be pretty unique about Oasis of Hope.

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yes. So, let me explain a little bit what happened and this vaccine was developed in America. The developers obtained two Nobel Prizes in medicine for it but, unfortunately, in America they’re still in clinical trials and I don’t know when it’s ever going to be approved. In Mexico, it’s approved because our FDA did not require safety test, which makes a lot of sense. It’s a vaccine that is prepared for one patient alone and it’s never going to be given to anybody else, and it’s prepared from their own cells.

The Mexican government said, we don’t need any safety tests, but at any rate… 

Sylvie Beljanski: In America, also, when it comes to vaccines, suddenly the testing is much, much easier. The bar is much lower than for anything else.

Dr. Francisco Contreras: The problem with it, what they’re trying to do in America, I think it’s not very wise, maybe to make money, but instead of using the patients’ antigens, they use antigens from the market.

What I mean by that is, let’s say a patient comes with a cancer to us and it’s cancer of the lung. We obtain cancer cells from our patient to develop the vaccine. In America, they come from cancer of the lung and they buy antigens of lung cancer from whomever and they prepare the vaccine. And I think in that case, you have to do some safety test because it’s not the patient’s own tissue.

So, what this is, as I said, creating an anti-tumor task force. So, dendritic cells, what they do is they present the foe to the specific agent within the immune system to attack that foe. So, if you have an infection, they go to the white cells that attack bacteria.

If you have cancer, they go to the white cells called the natural killer cells to attack the tumor. What happens, unfortunately, is that because tumors arise from our own cells, our immune system does not see them as foe. You actually have to wake the immune system up to that. What we do is that we obtain from the bloodstream around 300,000 dendritic cells in monocytes and we culture those monocytes into about 10 million dendritic cells in the lab.

Sylvie Beljanski: This is really at the core of personalized medicine. 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: It’s absolutely personalized. And then, we activate those cells with the antigens from the patient’s tumor, either from tumor circulating cells, from fresh tumor if we do a surgery, or from paraffin blocks if they had a biopsy before or a surgery. And we activate those dendritic cells with just one antigen and when we put them back, those cells are gonna be able to present the antigen of the tumor to their natural killer cells. That’s a big, the biggest part of the, of the vaccination. Okay. The second thing that we do is that we also culture natural killer cells from the patient, and we culture those again into about 10 million, and we make a presentation of the antigen in the laboratory.

So, those cells will go back into the system and immediately attack the tumor. They do not have to wait for any presentation, so it’s prepping the system in the meantime, or it’s an attack. In the meantime, the dendritic cells that we also implanted in the patient begin to advise the natural killer cells that are in the body to attack the tumor, and this has a synergistic effect in a very powerful anti-tumor effect.

Sylvie Beljanski: Excellent. I think that would complement actually pretty well the RNA fragments that my father developed. He developed some RNA fragments which are specific of the DNA of the bone marrow and helps the bone marrow to create all the generation of white blood cells in physiological numbers. There was some study which was done showing activation of the natural killer cells by 150%. So that’s not, it’s the, there is not the presentation done, this part doesn’t exist. But once a presentation is done, that would be a good way to continue to boost or promote.

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Definitely, anything that you can do to increase the amount of natural killer cells is very welcome.

And if on top of that we can do a presentation, then the results should be better. That’s an interesting thing. What we’ve, what we’re doing here is using some hormones that increase the level of white cells. And now there’s a new product that increases the level of monocytes which are the real, our real target, because monocytes are the ones that convert into dendritic cells.

And so, the more monocytes you have, the better the results are going to be. 

Sylvie Beljanski: Yeah. Yeah. We always stay in physiological level because as a body is doing its own thing, so we never create too much.

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yeah, that, that can always be dangerous. Here we’re putting from the outside of just a large amount in a short period of time to attack the tumor.

Future of Immunotherapy and Vision

Sylvie Beljanski: What is your vision for the future and what would you like to see happening? 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: I’m very excited because we have been pushing for immunotherapies for 60 years. Finally, the oncological world is coming to grips with that fact to the point that now there are at least 7 to 10 targeted immunotherapies developed that have been quite good for cancer patients.

And so I’m happy to see that. The evolution of immunotherapy, I believe it’s in CAR T cells. CAR T cells have proven to be quite effective, is more sophisticated than a dendritic cell but, unfortunately, it’s just terribly expensive. One treatment is about a half a million dollars and insurance companies are not paying for them.

We believe that we’re gonna be producing CAR T cells in about 2 years and around $50,000 a treatment instead of $500,000. And hopefully, as we do more and more, the price will come down. The future in immunology is wonderful, and I think that it’s going to be practical in the near future.

Right now, even dendritic cell vaccines in America are extremely expensive. There’s, they’re only available in clinical trials, but it’s extremely costly. Here in Mexico, I think it’s around $15,000, which is expensive, but nothing compared to conventional targeted therapies, for instance… 

Sylvie Beljanski: Absolutely.

Dr. Francisco Contreras: …where most patients are taking two or three, and each one costs about $10,000 every three weeks. Cancer therapy has become extremely expensive. 

Sylvie Beljanski: Yeah. That’s why integrative medicine is not so welcome because there is so much money to be done. 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yes. It’s a lot cheaper and much more effective.

Sylvie Beljanski: Yeah.

Victor, do you have another question? 

Victor Dwyer: No, I think that’s it. I thought everything was really good and was very insightful. I understand what the Oasis of Hope Hospital does and sounds like a perfect spot, like a, almost like a 21 day vacation a vacation and learning of cancer at the same time.

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yeah.

Victor Dwyer: And where you get the piece of that and also the peace of mind as well. It’s what I took away from that. 

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Yes. 

Victor Dwyer: Thank you everyone for watching up to this point. This is The Beljanski Cancer Talk Show and we’ll catch you next time. Thank you everyone.

Dr. Francisco Contreras: Thank you very much. Thank you.

Sylvie Beljanski: Thank you.

Francisco Contreras, MD serves as director, president, and chairman of Oasis of Hope Hospital. A distinguished surgical oncologist, Dr. Contreras is renowned for combining conventional and alternative medical treatments with emotional and spiritual support to provide patients with the most positive treatment experience possible.

After graduating from medical school at the Autonomous University of Mexico in Toluca, Dr. Contreras specialized in surgical oncology at the University of Vienna in Austria, where he graduated with honors. Dr. Contreras has authored fifteen books concerning integrative therapy including: The Art and Science of Undermining Cancer, 50 Critical Cancer Answers, The Hope of Living Cancer Free, The Coming Cancer Cure, Beating Cancer and Dismantling Cancer.

In addition to writing for medical journals, Dr. Contreras has participated in medical conferences such as the World Conference on Breast Cancer. He has addressed governmental organizations, including the Georgia House of Representatives Health Policy Task Force and the Japanese Medical Association. He has also been on special assignment to Slovakia as a member of the Mexican Health Advisory Board.