CAR T-cell therapy may rollout for Indian cancer patients in 8 months: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Indian-American oncologist and Pulitzer prize-winning author Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee has joined hands with Biocon Chairperson Kiran Mazumdar Shaw to bring innovative Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy to cancer patients in India.

CAR T-cells stands for a kind of immunological cell that is derived from your own body and is engineered or weaponised to go and kill cancer cells in your body.

At present, CAR T-cell treatment isn’t available at any price in India. A company formed this year in Bangalore by Mukherjee, Shaw and Kush Parmar plans to pioneer care delivery models at a much lesser cost that could change the way CAR T and other cell therapies are developed around the world.

In a free-wheeling interview with CNBC-TV18, Mukherjee talks about the cutting edge treatment and its implications on cancer care in the country.

“A part of the reason that I began to collaborate with Kiran was that if we can have one of those most viable telecom and software sectors on the planet, we should be able to make cellular therapies; we should be able to make CAR T-cell, T-cell. There is no fundamental reason that Indian engineers and Indian scientists and of course ultimately Indian patients cannot get access to these therapies,” Mukherjee pointed out.

Source: CNBC-TV18