Advancement of immuno-oncologyin India

Leela

,Director,Bugworks

The projected cancer burden in India for 2021 was 26.7 million and is expected to increase to 29.8 million in 2025. Traditionally, cancer patients have been exposed to treatments such as chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation that attack their cancers but often damage the healthy tissues and have serious limitations. For e.g., surgery may not be possible in large, inoperable tumours. At times, the tumours are operable, but cancer has spread to other parts of the body and thus the local treatment does not work. Chemotherapy kills cells across the body with a high chance that the cells develop resistance over time. In the pursuit to address these challenges, immunologists and oncologists have focused their efforts on deciphering how to harness a patient’s immune system to kill cancer cells. These systematic efforts have led to the development of immuno-oncology (IO) drugs that stimulate the patient's immune system with the goal of achieving long-term and durable responses in a variety of hard-to-treat cancers offering long-term survival, reduced toxicity from treatment, and improved quality of life. There are several types of IO treatment options, each with distinct mechanisms of amping up the patient's immune system against cancers. In India, there have been several recent advances in cancer immunotherapy research and treatment. One of the most significant advances has been the development of cancer vaccines. Researchers in India have been working on developing cancer vaccines that can stimulate the immune system to attack cancer cells. These vaccines are still in the early stages of development, but they have shown promising results in preclinical studies.

Another area of research that is gaining momentum in India is the use of immunomodulatory drugs, also known as checkpoint inhibitors. These drugs are designed to remove the "brakes" that cancer cells put on the immune system, allowing the immune system to attack cancer more effectively.

In 2020, the Indian government approved the first immunotherapy drug in India, which is called Nivolumab, and it is available for use as a firstline treatment for a certain type of lung cancer. Additionally,