Institutes sign MoU for cancer research
The move aims at improving the prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of types of cancers by enhancing the understanding on cancer.
Mumbai: A Memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed among US’s National Cancer Institute (NCI), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) and Tata Memorial Centre (TMC) on Clinical Proteogenomics Cancer Research on Wednesday.
The move aims at improving the prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of types of cancers by enhancing the understanding on cancer. The research will primarily focus on breast, cervical and gastrointestinal cancers.
Proteogenomics is the combination of the advanced fields of genomics (the study of genes and DNAs) and proteomics (the study of proteins that make up genes).
According to the oncologist Dr Sudeep Gupta from TMC, “Every cancer cell has lakhs of proteins cells. Each tumour thus has a signature protein expression thus the study of this will be able to detect this particular type of cell for better treatment.”
He added, “Theoreti-cally, mapping the changes caused by cancer in protein chains and genes could help develop new treatment modalities and medicines. All these things are in pipelines thus lots of things related to this study will be benefited from this.”
The country also has peculiar patterns; for instance, India has maximum number of head, neck ad cervical cancer cases. Hence, we will first jointly study cancers of the breast, head and neck, gastrointestinal passage and cervix, Dr Gupta said.
The MoU will benefit in creating an unprecedented international dataset to advance cancer research as well as treatments.
Emperor of maladies
According to the National Cancer Registry Programme, 11 lakh people are diagnosed with cancer every year across the country. Five lakh cancer-afflicted people die annually and the total number of cancer patients stood at around 28 lakh.