CANCER THE NEW CURES

Cellular intervention promises to change the way the emperor of maladies is diagnosed, treated and perhaps even cured in India

- SONALIA CHARJEE

Purwar, who joined IIT Bombay as a professor that year, began to use the institute’s lab to set up an immunoengineering team that would spend the next 3-4 years developing CD-19 CAR-T, the country’s first indigenous chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy—a treatment where human T cells (a kind of white blood or immune cell) are altered in the lab to hunt and attack cancerous cells. Today, CD-19 CAR-T has received two patents, approval in the US to treat certain blood cancers and is gearing up for its Phase 2/ 3 trials in India, and there is hope that it could be offered as a treatment in Indian hospitals by early next year. “It is an exciting time for gene and cell therapy in India,” says Purwar, who is now the CEO of ImmunoACT, the company that will make the new therapy available in India once it is approved at a fraction of the cost overseas. “There is a lot more investment and interest and the results are very encouraging. We are estimating cost to be around Rs 30 lakh per patient compared to Rs 3-4 crore in the US,” he says. This should offer a new lease of life to people who earlier thought cancer was the end of the road for them.

Cancer is a disease where abnormal cells divide uncontrollably, and in doing so, destroy healthy tissue, eventually claiming a person’s life. All cancers start inside cells due to genetic changes within them. Usually, cells produce signals to control how much and how often they divide. If any of these signals turns faulty, cells start to grow without control, eventually resulting in a lump or tumour. In cancer, the body is unable to recognise and dispel the cancerous cells in the same way that it can detect invading viruses or bacteria.