New Delhi (NVI): The bare-walled, seemingly paperless office of Professor Vaskar Saha at the Tata Medical Centre (TMC) in Kolkata belies the amount of work Professor Saha has undertaken since embarking on an Anglo-Indian project, to cure children from the most common type of childhood cancer.
Work led by Professor Saha, a paediatrician from the University of Manchester, shows that around 80% of children with the most common childhood cancer are now likely to survive following treatment at major centres across India, thanks to his revolutionary approach.
Initially, Saha’s research at the University of Manchester has helped increase survival rates among children with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) by 10% in the United Kingdom.
Vaskar Saha, a global expert on the disease, has helped cure children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) by 15% during the past five years in which he has led the ICICLE (Indian Childhood Collaborative Leukaemia Group) clinical project, in partnership with Tata Medical Centre, Kolkata.
With survival rates up from 60% to 90% in the West, the challenge was to bring about similar improvements in other parts of the world. It was a challenge that brought Saha to India.
Around 4,000 families across India have benefited from better treatment, thanks to systems and protocols he brought with him from Manchester and shared with other hospitals across the country.
“I wanted to see if the science as applied in the NHS and Europe could also be applied to help children in less developed countries have the same opportunities for surviving,” Saha explains.
Survival rates of most cancer patients in India are usually 15-25% lower than the United Kingdom. However, with Professor Saha’s work challenging the stereotype that cancer cure is a prerogative of affluent nations, his research has increased survival rates in Kolkata from 65% in 2014 to 80% in 2019.
Vaskar Saha said, “In the UK, 450 children are diagnosed annually with ALL, of which 400 will survive. In India, 9,000 of the 15,000 children diagnosed annually will survive. Not so long ago, four in ten Indian children would die because of poor treatment and relapse. The former was mainly due to the absence of standardisation in testing and treatment.”
“If we can improve outcomes in India by 10%, then an additional 1,500 children a year grow up to lead normal lives,” Vaskar added.
Transferring his knowledge to help raise standards of care in the developing world, Professor Saha will soon be facilitating other self-sustaining centres in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Chandigarh.
