War Against Cancer!

Research on the disease is at the tipping point of major breakthroughs. Advances in gene sequencing, innovative diagnostics open up a whole new world of possibilities for treatment in India
 

- Damayanti Datta

He was a ruggedly handsome man in life: shirt unbuttoned, muscles rippling, cigarette dangling rakishly from his lips. He was unrecognisable in death: pinched, pale, almost skeletal. For those who knew him onscreen, there was shock and despair at the final terror of his illness. Vinod Khanna, one of the last screen titans of a generation, battled a lethal form of bladder cancer, resistant to chemotherapy, for six long years and finally succumbed on April 27. That very week, however, the world of science celebrated a “huge breakthrough”: the discovery of a new drug based on malaria proteins that can dramatically reduce hardto-treat bladder cancers.

Another breakthrough, another life. “It’s finally here. A new ray of hope in the field of cancer. ‘Nivolumab’ for aggressive Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Spread t word.” Mamta Mohandas, 32, calls herself ‘Actor. Singer. Survivor’ on Twitter and posts messages of hope to her 495K followers. Her rising career graph in Malayalam and Telugu cinema, despite her seven-year-long fight against an aggressive lymph cancer, Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma, is legend. Ever since she joined a clinical trial for an experimental drug in Los Angeles, USA, the southern beauty has been upbeat. “It’s working for me,” she informs her fans. “Brave girl”, “love u”, “ jaldi aaja”, they respond.

TIME OF BREAKTHROUGHS