MICROSCOPE MUSINGS

There have been other Indian doctorwriters before, but none as popular as Pulitzer-winner Siddhartha Mukherjee. He is out with his new book, The Song of The Cell, and is trying to make cancer treatment cheaper in India, one step at a time

- MANDIRA NAYAR

His week begins with blood. Every Monday, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee arrives early at his Columbia University lab to stare through the microscope at slides of red. Waiting very much in Shakespearean fashion for his patient's blood to speak to him.

We speak on a Thursday. Mukherjee is in his loft in New York, making a sandwich and promoting his new book The Song of The Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and The New Human. It is his fourth book, the earlier ones being The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (which won him a Pulitzer), The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science and The Gene: An Intimate History. Its arrival in stores is very much a worldwide publishing event.

The next two months are big for Mukherjee, for his various identities of oncologist, scientist, writer, and now entrepreneur. Book aside, in December, he flies to Bengaluru to assess the results of a CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cell trial for cancer. His laboratory, which has a reputation for cancer research, is responsible for starting one of India's first clinical trials of T-cell therapy.

AT cell is a kind of white blood cell. "A CAR T cell is a T cell that has been weaponised against cancer," he says. "It is a process that can be highly effective in curing patients, but it is also very dangerous."

Immuneel Therapeutics, the Bengaluru-based company that Mukherjee and Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar Shaw started, is working towards a treatment that will cost far less than treatments in the US. It has recently raised $15 million. IIT Bombay and Tata Memorial are also doing similar trials; theirs is in phase one, and Immuneel is in phase two.