Students look at a model of the Kaveri engine at the exhibition organised as part of the Bengaluru Tech Summit on Wednesday.
Credit: DH Photo/Ranju P
Bengaluru: The next drug discovery story for cancer has to be from India, using data from and for Indian patients, according to surgical oncologist Dr Vishal Rao.
Speaking at the Bengaluru Tech Summit on Wednesday, he stressed the need to disrupt the existing ecosystem because nearly 30 per cent of the 14 lakh cancer patients are not treatable on the first day. "That has to change," he added.
Dr Rao, who is the Director of Head and Neck Surgical Oncology and Robotic Surgery at HCG Cancer Centre, has developed and obtained patents for three cancer drugs, one of which is an allo-polyherbal drug.
"We are moving to precision targets in cancer treatment, the era of 'carpet bombing' (any drug affecting the body as a whole) is over. We have everything we need here in the country and the governments are very encouraging," he said, after attending a panel discussion on 'Next-gen Immunotherapies for Cancer (advanced cancer vaccines)'.
The panel explored various upcoming approaches to treating cancer, including therapeutic vaccines.
Panellists acknowledged the shift from chemotherapy and immunotherapy, with more personalised medicine coming to the fore. Exploring combinations with CAR-T cell therapy, cytokine therapy, and targeted protein therapies is the way forward, while synergy among different research organisations, startups, clinical experts, and other stakeholders is the need of the hour.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a huge role in speeding up the process of screening for cancers and ease the process of obtaining regulatory clearances for new cancer therapies.
Developing models that could work as US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pre-consults can reduce the possibility of rejections of FDA approvals and the requirement for huge teams to manually synthesise large chunks of information, noted Dr Ujjwal Rao, CEO, Rector Healthcare.
"The challenge there is to come up with models which understand the mind of the FDA instructor, instances of previous rejections. That is an application we are currently working on," he said.
Dr Jyothsna Rao, Research Director, International Stem Cell Services, Bengaluru, said that DNA-based vaccines were quickly becoming one of the best options for cancer.
"Cells are heterogenous so we cannot always target one molecule because that brings in selectivity and that is a major problem in all therapies which are targeted. Therefore, one has to mix it with pan approach... such that there is synergy between that molecule and the rest of the ecosystem. In targeted therapies, I have always seen that the cancer cell will re-emerge and become more resistant," she said. She added that there is a lot of promise in dendritic cell therapy when combined with CAR-T cells.