Considering that CAR-T therapy is expensive, it is difficult to scale beyond a point, said Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Biocon Chairperson, along the sidelines of the inauguration of a bone marrow transplant (BMT) unit at the Mazumdar Shaw Medical Centre in Bengaluru’s Narayana Health on Friday.

“We are trying to combine a large number of therapies. Immunotherapy is a very effective therapy which can be delivered to a large number of patients. It is proving to be extremely beneficial for treating various types of cancers. This is something we can scale up fast with the help of biosimilars and other products in India,” Shaw said.

She is also the cofounder of Immuneel Therapeutics, a clinical-stage startup involved in cell and gene therapies, and personalised immunotherapy for patients in India.

The company is working on bringing treatments like CAR-T therapy to cancer patients in India at a time when the country is witnessing a dramatic increase in cancer cases.

CAR-T therapies, previously not available in India, have shown promising results for patients who have exhausted all other means of treatment in a range of blood cancers.

These therapies are available internationally at more than $350,000 per dose. The startup aims to provide affordable access to this therapy.

“It is obviously difficult to scale up such an expensive therapy beyond a point. Many CAR-T companies are necessary overtime to develop a large number of programmes to address the huge demand that there will be in the future,” she said. As per the Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) projection, there are likely to be 29.8 million cancer cases by 2025 in the country.

“The first recourse should be bone marrow transplant and only in case of a relapse, patients should be advised costly personalised therapies like CAR-T,” she said.

Paediatric patients
At Mazumdar Shaw Medical Centre, 1,100 to 1,200 new patients treated in a year out of which 500 to 600 are males, 500 are females and around 100 children.

“Quite a large number of paediatric patients are receiving both bone marrow transplant intervention and some of them have participated in the CAR-T trials also. It is interesting to see that the response rate for children is always very high. The moment they respond to the therapy they are cured. That is the beauty of these therapies,” she said.

With the launch, the BMT unit has strengthened its capacity to 34 beds by adding 10 new beds.

“Whether it is public or private, or in partnership, we need scale,” Shaw said. Earlier, NH had successfully treated 2,000 patients through bone marrow transplant in October 2022.