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Mumbai: Tackling cancer remains one of the most formidable challenges for clinicians, despite significant advancements in diagnostics, care delivery, and therapeutics.
While some innovations are constrained by high costs, others face regulatory hurdles or have limited applicability across patient populations.
As most treatment frameworks are shaped by Western settings, India faces its own distinct challenges, making it imperative to move beyond standardized protocols and identical policy models toward adaptive, tailored strategies.
Delving into this topic, ETHealthworld convened a panel discussion at the Oncology Leadership Summit, exploring “The Right Approach in Cancer Care: From Breakthroughs to Impact.”
At the outset, Dr. Vinod Raina, Chairman-Oncology, Fortis Memorial Research Institute, noted that India continues to face significant underreporting of cancer prevalence due to limited data-collection systems.
As a disease closely linked to ageing, he said what the country is currently witnessing is only the tip of the iceberg. With India’s demographic profile steadily shifting toward an older population, casting a wider net across both private and public healthcare facilities is critical to ensuring effective detection and delivery of care.
Dr. Sewanti Limaye, Director – Medical & Precision Oncology, Oncology Research at Reliance Foundation Hospital, emphasized the need to develop and integrate AI-driven advancements to bridge resource constraints, noting that “such technologies are highly beneficial for resource-limited settings and could be further leveraged to identify high-risk patients.”
She also highlighted the use of Multi-Cancer Early Detection (MCED) tests—single samples capable of detecting multiple cancer types. However, she stressed that innovators must improve sensitivity: while these tests achieve around 90 percent sensitivity for stage-3 tumours, similar precision is required for stage-2 and stage-1 cancers to meaningfully improve patient outcomes.
Dr. Jyoti Bajpai, Lead of Medical and Precision Oncology at Apollo Cancer Centres, emphasized that instead of viewing cancer as a single isolated event, the disease requires a continuum of care beginning with prevention, with personalized therapies playing a crucial role given the diversity of the patient population.
To break access barriers associated with newer modalities, Dr. Sameer Bakhshi, Professor & Head of the Department of Medical Oncology at AIIMS Delhi, reiterated that the industry must focus on “breaking patents” rather than relying on the past practice of “refurbishing existing ones.”
“Many innovations emerging in India are essentially refurbished versions of solutions already available in the Western world. We must break patents. Numerous studies have shown that the same drugs at different dosage strengths can be as effective as the original maintenance dose,” he said, adding, “We need to focus on developing new products, identifying novel targets, and exploring new delivery vectors. Only homegrown, original solutions can significantly reduce therapy costs and expand access.”
Dr. Limaye underlined that most breakthrough therapies are currently imported, making them prohibitively expensive for patients. Without scaling up clinical trials within India, progress will remain stalled—and such efforts cannot move forward without meaningful participation from private players.
“It is essentially a matter of demand and supply,” she said, adding that while pharmaceutical companies need patients to conduct trials, patients equally need access to these life-saving drugs.
Questioning the industry’s practice of prioritizing Western guidelines, particularly those of the FDA, Dr. Raina cautioned that many drugs approved in the US are tested on healthy volunteers, whereas their real-world application is in already diagnosed patients. He noted that this is one of the core reasons India reports higher rates of toxicity among cancer patients.
Dr. Bajpai, who has led several studies in her clinical practice, added that lower doses are often more appropriate in the Indian context. Differences in pharmacogenomics and generally smaller body surface areas mean that dosages recommended in Western guidelines frequently do not yield the desired outcomes.
However, Dr. Raina observed that funding continues to remain a central challenge to research progress in India, and establishing indigenous protocols hinges on creating a strong, research-driven ecosystem.
