SRINAGAR: Under its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Program, J&K Bank presented an amount of Rs 14.40 Lacs to the premier healthcare institution of Jammu and Kashmir for procurement of Platelet/Therapeutic Plasma Apheresis kits for treatment of poor patients suffering from cancer and severe blood dysfunctional diseases.
JK Bank’s Divisional Head Kashmir, Syed Shafat Hussain on Wednesday handed over the cheque to Director SKIMS, Professor Parvez Koul
An official statement reads that in a function organized at SKIMS Soura, the Bank’s Divisional Head Kashmir, Syed Shafat Hussain today handed over the cheque to Director SKIMS, Professor Parvez Koul in presence of Head Paediatric Oncology Department Dr Javed Rasool and Head BU SKIMS, Syed Irfan besides other officials of SKIMS and the bank. Pertinently, the event coincided with the ‘International Childhood Cancer Day’, which is observed on 15th February all over the world to raise awareness about childhood cancer and honours all the children and families experiencing the effects of the disease.
Speaking on the occasion, Syed Shafat Hussain said, “Healthcare is critical for every society and with rise in the number of patients suffering from terminal ailments in J&K, we do feel the need to step in and do our bit. However, as a socially responsible institution, it is a very humble contribution from J&K Bank to SKIMS Srinagar for the patients who cannot afford these kits critical for their treatment.”
“Besides empowering the people financially, J&K Bank has been contributing to the society through its CSR activities meant for helping the economically weaker sections especially in health sector. We believe our little support would help many patients and alleviate the hardships of their families,” an official handout quoted Syed Shafaat Hussain as having said.
According to statement, Director SKIMS Srinagar thanked the Bank for the contribution and expressed hope that amid rising number of patients suffering from such dangerous diseases and dysfunctionalities, the Bank would increase its CSR spend towards healthcare as a large number of the patients hailing from weaker socio-economic background visit SKIMS Hospital for treatment in pediatric oncology every year who find it difficult to afford expensive Apheresis kits containing Platelet/Therapeutic Plasma. “With J&K Bank’s earlier support, we have been able to increase the survival rate among the children suffering from cancer and many of them are today present in this function to collectively thank J&K Bank for their help and support,” he added.
Pertinently, in the last year also, J&K Bank had contributed an amount of Rs. 7.85 lacs to SKIMS for procuring these kits which have been utilized for the treatment of hundreds of poor patients especially children.
For decades, Ken Brock and Gary Enos largely toiled in the same hangars at New Hampshire’s Pease national air base. The career US national guard members were responsible for giving fuel planes tail-to-nose inspections that prevented crashes.
“We were like general practitioners for planes,” Enos said.
Like hundreds of others who served at Pease, both developed cancer, which they and their families believe was probably from exposure to staggering levels of toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” in the base’s drinking water.
Brock died in 2017, and Enos has survived two bouts of cancer. Yet despite the similar career paths and illness, the military paid for Enos’s care and disability benefits – but not for Brock and his surviving wife.
Since then, the military has been fighting efforts by Brock’s widow, Doris Brock, to get benefits for her and service members who worked for decades at the base. It denies PFAS is behind Pease’s high cancer rates, and helped kill legislation to fund a cancer study that could have proved it wrong.
Doris Brock is now leading the charge in a two-pronged David-versus-Goliath battle: she and a group of veterans’ advocates aim to prove Pease’s toxic water is behind the base’s cancer levels, and, on her own, she is pushing to change federal law so career national guard members who do not have sufficient active duty time can still get veterans’ benefits.
Though her husband died in 2017, Brock says she is “still angry”.
“He has been gone for five and a half years, but it’s gone from a personal nature to a ‘This isn’t right for everyone else still out there,’” she added. “So many people who worked on this base are hurting.”
Pease is home to the 157th Air Refueling Wing, and the base also holds 13 superfund sites, which is a designation for the nation’s most contaminated land. Among the pollutants are PFAS, a class of chemicals typically used to make thousands of consumer products resist water, stains and heat. They are linked to serious health issues such as cancer, kidney disease, fetal complications, liver disease and autoimmune disorders.
For decades beginning in the 1970s, Pease’s service members drank contaminated water. The Environmental Protection Agency last year issued new advisory health guidelines that found virtually no level of exposure to two different kinds of PFAS is safe – Pease’s levels were tens of thousands of times above those thresholds.
The situation is nearly identical to that at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina, where the military has agreed to pay benefits for those who served at the base and drank contaminated water. But at Pease, the military is using what veterans advocates say are unfair rules or seemingly arbitrary application of rules to deny care and disability payments for many of them.
When denying Brock’s benefits, the military has said it cannot be proven that Brock’s and others’ cancers stem from PFAS exposure, Doris Brock said. And though Ken Brock worked full-time for 35 years and deployed around the world to serve during combat, the military initially claimed he did not have the 90 days of consecutive active duty time required for benefits.
The New Hampshire air national guard did not answer specific questions about the situation. But Brig Gen John Pogorek noted the national guard was working on the issue as part of the Pease health working group, which was established to find answers about the cancers after pressure from Doris Brock.
‘That’s when I got mad’
Ken Brock retired from Pease in 2005 and in 2015 tests revealed a bladder cancer that had nearly advanced to stage four, and doctors gave him up to five years to live.
In 2016, Brock applied for Veterans Affairs benefits that would have paid for his care, given him access to VA hospitals, and qualified him for disability payments, and Doris Brock for survivor payments after he died.
But Brock was rejected, and after trying experimental chemotherapy treatments, he died in June 2017 aged 67.
Enos had a different experience: he developed bladder cancer in 2007 and received health care and disability payments. When the cancer returned in his prostate in 2017, he used private insurance, but still continued to receive disability payments.
Though he and Brock proved they had adequate active duty time, only Brock was denied benefits. And still others who served for decades next to them aren’t receiving benefits because they do not have adequate active duty time. The situation is “not right”, said Enos, who is part of the working group.
“I want my friends and comrades to live, to get the services they need to live and to be compensated for what they have done for their country,” he added.
Doris Brock said she was told by Veterans Affairs in 2016 “it costs too much” to pay for all veterans to receive benefits.
“They said, ‘That’s why we have these rules,’” she added. “That’s when I got mad enough to say, ‘OK, fine, I’m going to fight to change the rules.’”
She set out on a “research quest” in 2016 to learn more about the link between Ken Brock’s cancer and Pease’s contamination and quickly found dozens of service members around his age also had cancer, and learned about the high PFAS levels in the drinking water.
‘There’s a problem’
After Brock pulled together a coalition of veterans and advocates in 2018, the group seemed to score a major victory when the military agreed to do a cancer mortality study, which Congress funded in that year’s defense bill.
But the military probably only agreed to it because they know mortality studies are of limited use, said Mindi Messmer, a scientific adviser for the Pease health working group. It only looked at death rates, and fewer people are dying from cancer because of advancements in medicine and early detection.
“If a bunch of people are getting sick from their service but not dying then there’s less of a case for the military to have to pay benefits,” Messmer said.
Still, the death rates at Pease are so high that the 2021 results revealed statistically elevated levels of prostate, breast and lung cancers.
“Sometimes, as much as they try not to show it, they can’t bend things that much and they have to admit there’s a problem,” Messmer said.
A mortality study also does not prove the water at the base is behind the elevated cancer levels. Proof requires a cancer incidence study. Funding for an incidence study was included in the version of last year’s defense bill that passed the House, but it was stripped from the final Senate bill.
Advocates said they were told by their congressional delegation that the military did not want the study, so it was left out.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how angry I was when I heard that it was cut,” Brock said.
Gen Pogorek said the New Hampshire air guard supports a cancer incidence study and “can’t speak for why it was dropped”.
Hope also came and went when Congress passed in August the Honoring our Pact Act, which significantly expanded benefits for veterans exposed to toxins, but still excluded most at Pease.
The group is now exploring how to chart a new path forward. Separately, Doris Brock continues pushing for a bill to scrap the active duty requirements for career national guard members, and the issue is now being studied.
Though both prongs of her David-and-Goliath battle face uncertain futures after years of twisting the military’s arm, Brock remains steadfast.
“I’m not going away,” she said.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
New Delhi; The government is likely to begin administering anti-cervical cancer vaccine in girls aged nine to 14 years in six states in June, official sources said on Sunday.
In the first phase of the vaccination campaign, 2.55 crore girls are targeted to be administered the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Mizoram, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, an official source told PTI.
The Union Health Ministry has drawn a roadmap to roll out HPV vaccine in the universal immunisation programme and is likely to float a global tender in April for 16.02 crore doses to be procured by 2026, official sources said.
The Serum Institute’s made-in-India vaccine against cervical cancer, CERVAVAC, was launched last month.
Prakash Kumar Singh, Director of Government and Regulatory Affairs at the Serum Institute of India (SII), has written a letter to the Health Ministry its first indigenous HPV vaccine will be available in the private market at an MRP of Rs 2,000 per dose, it has been learnt. CERVAVAC will be available in two-dose glass vial presentation.
Singh is learnt to have communicated in his letter that CERVAVAC will be supplied at an affordable rate whenever the Health Ministry floats a tender.
Currently, only one HPV vaccine — American multinational Merck’s Gardasil — is available in the private market in single-dose pre-filled syringe presentation and its price is Rs 10,850.
India is home to about 16 per cent of the world’s women, but it accounts for about a quarter of all cervical cancer incidences and nearly a third of global cervical cancer deaths.
Indian women face a 1.6 per cent lifetime cumulative risk of developing cervical cancer and 1 per cent cumulative death risk from cervical cancer, officials had stated.
According to some recent estimates, every year almost 80,000 women develop cervical cancer and 35,000 die due to it in India.
“It’s a lot harder than getting a man to the moon,” Gilbert Welch, an internist and senior investigator at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said of curing cancer. “It’s a very complex set of diseases. You need to think of it as a family of diseases. The moon is just one thing. Just gotta get there. This is hundreds of different things.”
Biden wants to press ahead on a bipartisan initiative. He has called on Congress to maintain funding for the 2016 law that launched the moonshot, the 21st Century Cures Act. He pledged to cut cancer death rates by 50 percent in the next 25 years and to turn fatal cancers into treatable diseases.
Biden also has asked Congress to reauthorize the National Cancer Act, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Reauthorization would help the National Cancer Institute support researchers around the country by building clinical trial networks and more robust data systems, according to Danielle Carnival, the White House’s moonshot coordinator.
But some experts, such as Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former White House adviser, said there’s plenty of money devoted to cancer research. The National Cancer Institute had a nearly $6.4 billion budget for cancer research in 2021 and its annual spend has been growing since 2015. Cancer non-profits like the American Cancer Institute also raise hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
Additionally, the pharmaceutical industry is incentivized to put money behind increasingly lucrative cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. Research shows that from 2010 to 2019 revenue generated from cancer medicines increased 70 percent among the top 10 pharmaceutical companies to reach $95 billion.
And not everyone thinks more funding is a good thing. “There’s so much money sloshing around,” Welch said of the cancer industry, adding, “Both academic and biotech or industry are excessively enthusiastic and just trying to put out as many products as they can.”
We’ve overinvested in cancer, according to Welch, especially in expensive cancer drugs with modest or unproven benefit for patients and in screenings — Welch’s research area. He’s particularly opposed to the Medicare Multi-Cancer Early Detection Screening Coverage Act, sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), which would require Medicare to cover cancer blood tests if they’re approved by the FDA. From Welch’s vantage point, benefits from screenings have been exaggerated, while its harms have been minimized.
Other critics, such as Keith Humphreys, a public health professor at Stanford University who has published academic articles on the link between alcohol use and cancer, see cancer prevention as a more immediate way to save lives.
Managing disease and curing it
The president’s agenda goes beyond money, Carnival told POLITICO, emphasizing prevention efforts, such as improving nutrition for kids, discouraging smoking, and decreasing environmental risks.
“We’re going to have to reach more people with the tools we already have and those we develop along the way,” Carnival said. “The purview is much broader than research. I don’t think anyone would say we have all of the research advancements and knowledge and treatments that we need today to end cancer as we know it.”
Those closely involved in developing cutting-edge cancer therapeutics said the field has shifted dramatically in recent years. It’s gone from treating cancer as a chronic disease, to trying to cure patients.
During his medical fellowship in the early 2000s, improving patient survival by months or years was the goal, explained Marco Davila, a physician-scientist at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, N.Y., who helped pioneer some of the first CAR-T cell therapies for patients with blood cancer.
Since then, treatment breakthroughs for some previously incurable cancer have upended the cancer-as-chronic-disease philosophy. Now, doctors and researchers believe cancer-curing therapies are within reach. “It’s changed the nature of how we manage patients. There’s that option there. It’s on the table,” Davila said.
For Davila, moonshot funds earmarked for cancer research and therapies created a new pool of money for his work. It doesn’t fix the problem of underfunded science as a whole, he said, but it makes his work as a cancer researcher a priority.
“It’s great for us, because that’s our field. It’s also great for patients, because cancer is still going to be one of the most common causes of people’s death in the United States,” Davila said. (In the U.S., it’s second behind heart disease, taking more than 600,000 lives in 2020, the most recent year for which there are statistics.)
Indeed, since the late 1980s, scientists have developed effective treatments for lung cancer, breast cancer and Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There are caveats, of course. They don’t work for all patients.
“It’s maybe 20 percent, 30 percent,” Davila said. The goal now is to keep improving those cure rates over time — to 50 percent or 60 percent, for example.
“Will it get to 100 percent in your lifetime? I don’t know,” he said.
What Davila does know is that each 10 percent cure-rate increase means saving tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of lives.
‘Prevention takes action’
But some cancer experts said there’s a downside to the shift toward precision medicine and individualized treatments. Attempting to test everyone or characterize every tumor more precisely is a bit of magical thinking, according to Welch.
“The more you subset people, the more difficult it is to know whether your treatments help. It’s too small of a group,” Welch said. “It used to be just lung cancer. Now we’ve got eight genetic variants we’re testing in adenocarcinomas of the lung,” he added.
“Ironically, the more precise we get, the more types of cancer there are, as we genetically signature each cancer, all of a sudden we don’t really know what to do with any one of them.”
Others think there needs to be a fundamental shift away from screening and treatment and toward preventing cancer in the first place.
“It’s terrific when we develop new treatments for cancer, but it certainly is always better to prevent something than to treat it,” said Humphreys, who served as a drug policy adviser under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“Very high-end, complicated treatments are never going to be accessible to the whole population,” he added. “Congress could definitely do more.”
Tobacco taxation is widely considered one of the most effective practices in preventing people from starting to smoke in the first place, leading existing smokers to quit, and reducing deaths from tobacco-related cancers. Humphreys said Congress could take the same taxation approach to the alcohol industry. “We have very good evidence that when we raise the federal alcohol tax that fewer people die,” he said.
While broad blood-based cancer screening may not be a cost-effective strategy for stopping cancer early, targeted cancer screening for colorectal, breast, cervical, prostate, and lung cancers could be. Rules could stoke participation or ensure that patients on Medicaid, who are more likely to be at risk of cancer, are getting regular screenings.
“It’s important to acknowledge that our biggest success in cancer really reflects prevention,” Welch said. “It’s nothing fancy. It’s discouraging cigarette smoking.”
Following a surgeon general warning in the 1960s about the health risk of smoking, and subsequent anti-smoking campaigns, tobacco use — and later lung cancer rates — plummeted.
The White House touts prevention in its moonshot agenda. In 2022, the first year of the reignited moonshot, the FDA proposed rules to prohibit menthol cigarettes. Among other agenda items, the moonshot program plans to increase cancer screenings in at-risk communities and facilitate donations of sunscreen to schools and youth organizations.
But prevention is a trickier cancer-prevention mechanism than treatment. It could mean cleaning up Superfund sites or removing lead pipes to reduce environmental cancer risk. It often requires people to change their behavior — to drink less alcohol and exercise more or stop smoking — a more challenging mission at the population level than directing patients to take a pill or offering them a diagnostic test.
“It’s not necessarily clear how one spends money on prevention,” Welch acknowledged. “It’s much easier to sell a test or a drug. It’s a concrete thing. Prevention takes action on the part of individuals,” he said. “You gotta say, that’s harder.”
More funding wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem, according to Emanuel.
There’s a lot of money already in the system. It just needs to be redirected and allocated differently, Emanuel explained.
Who is spending that money also matters. The government sponsors roughly one-third of clinical cancer research, according to Emanuel. Industry accounts for the remaining two-thirds of funding. “It’s good that they’ve got a lot of drugs that they’re testing. What’s bad is having industry shape the clinical research agenda, because industry has a bias.”
Emanuel’s solution: stronger government leadership and more non-industry sponsors.
“The NCI [National Cancer Institute] is the biggest NIH institute,” Emanuel said. “It’s not exactly like they’re starving.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Srinagar, Feb 04: Cancer is devouring people across the globe with Jammu and Kashmir witnessing a rise in cases over the years.
The data shows that stomach cancer (25%) followed by colorectal (16%) and lung cancer (13.2%) is more common among males while colorectal cancer (16.8%), breast cancer (16%), and stomach cancer (10%) were mostly reported cancers among women.
The data shows that esophagus, stomach and colorectal cancers form 60 percent cases.
A leading oncologist at SKIMS Soura Dr Zahoor told the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) that the last decade has witnessed a steady rise in cancer cases.
He cited lifestyle change, adoption of western/urban lifestyle among the causes for the increase in the deadly disease.
Dr Zahoor listed individual changes to be followed including healthy lifestyle and food habits with physical exercise, quitting smoking for bringing down cases of cancer. At a collective level, measures include prevention of environmental pollution and drinking clean water.
Dr Shabnam, an oncosurgeon insisted for timely diagnosis and screening of cancer for appropriate treatment.
She said that this year, the 2nd part of 3-year UICC Campaign for Impact ‘ Close The Care Gap’ focuses on ‘Realising the Problem and Taking Action’, we all together can work on reducing the inequities in cancer care at all levels, starting from creating more awareness.
“People need to understand that 30-50% of cancers are preventable. If we focus on certain lifestyle modifications we can reduce our risk,” said Dr Shabnam.
She suggested quitting smoking and alcohol consumption and doing physical activity, weight reduction strategies, de-stressing, proper sleep, consuming fresh fruits and vegetables especially high fibre diets and antioxidant foods for avoiding cancer.
“Avoiding junk and packaged foods, reducing unnecessary exposure to various radiations like overuse of mobiles & other such devices especially in close proximity to their bodies, taking proper precautions to reduce exposure to occupational carcinogens like gamma rays, asbestos, cadmium, coal-tar, radon, aniline etc by using protective equipment & regular check-ups,” she said.
Dr S M Qadri too stressed for a healthy behaviour for reducing risk of cancer.
He said that people must avoid pollutants and harmful chemicals including asbestos, pesticides and containers with BPA, get vaccinated against HPV and know the cancer symptoms and signs.
Doctors said that people are taking a lot of red meat and are not following a physical exercise, eating less fruits and vegetables due to which colorectal cancers are reported in young people who are aged 20 which was otherwise found in people above 50.
They said the cooking and diet system needs to be changed and salt tea must be used as low as possible and never drink hot tea and ripening agents must be banned and colouring agents must be avoided or used under limits—(KNO)
Bengaluru: Obesity can lead to the development of 13 different types of cancer, experts said, adding people with obesity or severe obesity are 1.5 to 4 times at risk of developing cancer in organs like oesophagus, stomach, liver, pancreas, colorectal, gallbladder, kidney, and thyroid.
Tausif Ahmed Thangalvadi, Medical Director at NURA, a collaboration between Fujifilm Healthcare and Kutty’s Healthcare offering AI-enabled imaging in Bengaluru, highlighted key findings from a working group document of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) on the occasion of World Cancer Day.
Research has shown that obese women also face the impact of reproductive organ cancers like endometrial (4-7 times the risk compared to non-obese women), breast cancer (1.5 times) and ovarian cancer (1.1 times).
Breast cancer and colorectal cancer are the most common obesity related cancers in women and men, respectively, with 30 percent higher risk compared to non-obese people. A 2019 study found that obesity related cancers accounted for nearly 4 percent of the global burden of cancers, Thangalvadi said.
As per Unicef’s World Obesity Atlas 2022, India is predicted to have 2.7 crore children with obesity by 2030, he said.
Thangalvadi said: “There are many ways in which obesity can increase the risk of cancer. Fat tissue in the human body releases excess levels of oestrogen, which in women leads to an increased risk of breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancer. High levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) in obese people increases risk of colorectal, kidney and prostate cancer. Obesity also leads to chronic inflammation and oxidative stress on tissues, further increasing the risk of cancer.”
New Delhi: Chief Executive Officer of Serum Institute of India (SII), Adar Poonawalla, on Tuesday announced the launch of the first made-in-India Human Papillomavirus (HPV) “CERVAVAC” vaccine, for the prevention of cervical cancer.
The launch took place in the presence of Home Minister Amit Shah, Adar Poonawalla, and the Director of Government & Regulatory Affairs at Serum Institute of India, Prakash K Singh.
“On the occasion of India’s National Girl Child Day and Cervical Cancer Awareness Month, @SerumInstIndia is pleased to launch the first made-in-India HPV vaccine by the hands of our Hon’ble Home Minister Shri @AmitShah Ji. @PrakashKsingh7,” tweeted Adar Poonawalla.
‘CERVAVAC’ is an outcome of a partnership of DBT and BIRAC with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, supported by Serum Institute of India Private Limited for the indigenous development of quadrivalent vaccine through its partnership programme ‘Grand Challenges India’.
Earlier in December last, Dr NK Arora, chairman of the Covid working group, National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI) had said that it is expected India to get the HPV vaccine, by April at one-tenth cost.
Speaking to ANI, Dr Arora said, “There are two or three companies which are in the process (of manufacturing the vaccine in India) but the Serum Institute of India (SII) has already got the regulators’ clearance and the vaccine should be available for our patients by April or May 2023.”
“The vaccine should be available soon. I don’t know the exact cost yet but am given to understand that the cost of the vaccine will be one-tenth of the internationally-branded vaccine currently available,” he added.
Dr Arora further informed that almost 80,000 cases of cervical cancer occur in India every year.
“During the last 24 hours, our country lost 95-100 women due to cervical cancer. India accounts for the bulk of deaths from cervical cancer in the world. Almost 80,000 cases are reportedly worldwide every year. What is important to note here is that cervical cancer is entirely preventable through vaccination. The Human Papilloma Virus or HPV causes cervical cancer and a vaccine is available which can prevent it,” he added.
He said the Union government will be able to roll out the HPV vaccine as part of its national health programme for girls aged between 9 and 14 years.
Hyderabad: Gifts and Stationery India (GSI) and Telangana Facility Management Council (TFMC) have joined forces to organize the ‘Good Act – Walkathon 2023’ to raise awareness about cancer.
The walkathon consisted of participants walking from 6 am to 8 am on Sunday morning through the streets of Hyderabad.
This walkathon, held on the 22nd of January, Sunday, was organized as part of a larger initiative to better society and increase awareness regarding cancer.
Logistical support for the event was provided by major corporate houses based in Hyderabad, such as Vodafone, Sutherland Global, NITHM, JLL, CBRE and several others.
The idea behind organizing this walkathon was to bring together individuals who are passionate about making a change and contributing meaningfully towards bettering society.
The event saw participants from different walks of life and backgrounds come together for a common cause. The objective was to create an open platform that would allow everyone to contribute in their own way toward reducing the prevalence of cancer-related illnesses in the region.
Rakhi Mukherjee – Founder of GSI/ Expo Galaxia pvt Ltd, Satyanarayan Mathala – President TFMC, Dr Chinnam Reddy- Director – NITHM, Dr Usha Yanamandra- CEO- PROWESS IMAGE, Raman Rao- Vodafone Idea, Gourishankar Balawadgi – Sutherland Global and Key people have been part of the Walkathon.
This collaborative effort has been successful in creating greater awareness amongst citizens regarding cancer-related illness, as well as promoting good health practices that can help prevent many illnesses in general.
Alongside raising much-needed funds for cancer prevention initiatives, it has also enabled members of Hyderabad’s civic society to come together towards a meaningful cause — something which cannot be measured only in terms of financial contributions or donations alone!
Gifts & Stationery India Expo (GSI) a B2B Expo is coming to HITEX Exhibition Centre in Hyderabad on the 27th, 28th and 29th of January.
Organized by EXPO GALAXIA PVT LTD, this is the first-ever event of its kind with over 80 exhibitors/manufacturers and 160 brands from across India – including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Gujarat, Kolkata and Chennai.
This major Logistical event will be held in Hyderabad due to Telangana’s impressive ranking among Indian states in terms of GDP.
The Telangana government has invested heavily in the infrastructural development of the state over recent years, which makes it an ideal candidate for hosting such a large-scale event.
Gifts & Stationery India Expo (GSI) 2023, B2B Expo promises to provide a platform for businesses to showcase their products and services in the Gifts & Stationery industry.
Attendees will be able to browse through hundreds of items ranging from small gift items like greeting cards and keychains to corporate gifts like promotional mugs and apparel. They will also have access to exclusive offers from various exhibitors throughout the duration of the expo Said Rakhi Mukherjee – Founder of GSI/ Expo Galaxia Pvt Ltd.
The organizers are expecting a huge footfall at Gifts & Stationery India Expo (GSI) 2023 as they are offering an array of interesting activities at the event.
These include product demonstrations, special round table discussions with renowned industry experts and even contests with attractive prizes up for grabs! explore new trends in stationery design – making this expo an ideal destination for both business owners and consumers alike.
In addition to providing a platform for showcasing products, Gifts & Stationery India Expo (GSI) 2023 also aims to facilitate networking opportunities between exhibitors and attendees as well as build bridges between buyers and sellers in this industry. This provides a huge opportunity for businesses looking to expand their reach into new markets or develop existing relationships further.
Gifts & Stationery India Expo (GSI) 2023 is also an opportunity for people from all walks of life to come together under one roof and appreciate the artistry that takes many forms within the Gifts & Stationery industry – from traditional designs inspired by Indian culture to modern designs incorporating contemporary trends.
Register Now for Gifts & Stationery India Expo 2023 at the website.
Dr Muzaffar A Macha has been a ‘golden boy’ throughout. At AIIMS and abroad and now home as head of IUST’s Watson-Crick Centre for Molecular Medicine, after working extensively on head and neck cancers, he has been able to identify an antidote for managing the excruciating pain during all cancers. In a freewheeling conversation with Masood Hussain, the young scientist talks about his research career and the immediate goals he has set for himself and the centre
KASHMIR LIFE (KL): How was your journey from Kashmir to the USA and then back to Kashmir?
DR MUZAFFAR A MACHA (MAM): I have done my schooling at Madrassa Taleem-ul Islam (MTI), Tral. Then I did my bachelor’s in Biochemistry and Environmental Sciences from SP College Srinagar. After that, I went to the Jamia Hamdard for my master’s, which I completed in 2005. I topped there and also received a gold medal.
Then, I applied to various universities including Jawaharlal Nehru University, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, CCMB Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, and Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics for PhD. I was selected by three Universities, but I choose AIIMS, because of my personal preference and because of the good translational (applications to humans) research work that was being carried out at AIIMS.
There, I joined the laboratory of Dr Ranju Ralhan. Then I was shifted to another mentor, Sham Singh Chauhan who is the head of AIIMS’s biotechnology department.
I completed my PhD in 2010 and was awarded with a Gold medal called Gita Mittal Award for the best PhD student with the best publications. My PhD work was mostly about head and neck cancer.
After that, I went to the University of Nebraska Medical Center for my post-doctorate. There, I joined Dr Surinder Batra, a scientist and a pancreatic cancer specialist. I worked extensively there on cancer biology. Since I had worked on head and neck cancers during my PhD, because of the fact that India has the most cases of this cancer, I started a group to work further on this.
We continued to work for four and a half years till the completion of my Postdoc. After that, I was inducted there as an Assistant Professor in the same department. I continued there until 2019 and moved back home because of certain family reasons and eagerness to serve my own society.
After coming back, I applied for the Ramanujan Fellowship and Ramalingaswamy Fellowship and I was selected for both fellowships. I joined the Central University of Kashmir (CUK) as a Ramanujan Fellow.
A year after working there, I moved to the Watson-Crick Centre for Molecular Medicine of the Islamic University of Science and Technology (IUST). Soon joining as a Ramalingaswami fellow, I was selected as an Assistant professor for Molecular Medicine in the Centre. Presently I am heading the centre.
KL: Cancer is among the most life-threatening diseases. Where the science is right now in the understanding of cancer?
MAM: In the last 10 years, the technology that has emerged to identify cancer, to know the cause of cancer and to understand the basic molecular biological concepts proved to be useful and convenient. To a very large extent, we have conquered the battle against cancer. The immunotherapy that is often used these days is yielding good results in treating cancer. Recent studies and clinical trials all over the world proved that immunotherapy is good among all methods for treating cancer.
The Awantipora Molecule
KL: You have worked extensively on Head and Neck Cancer during your PhD. What were the major takeaways from the research?
MAM: As per the studies and statistical data, India has a huge consumption of tobacco products. Head and neck cancer is mostly because of the consumption of tobacco-based products. My research project during my PhD was based on “How cancer is caused by the consumption of Tobacco based products?” I identified cancer development at the molecular and cellular levels. I identified the novel signalling pathways that get activated and lead to cancer.
Along with this, I identified the usage of natural compounds like Curcumin and Guggulsterone to nullify the effects of smokeless tobacco. These compounds can largely reduce the effects of cancer-causing smokeless tobacco.
KL: Has there been any kind of comparative study? I mean is the pattern different for cancers caused by smoking and non-smoking cancer agents?
MAM: It has been studied and is widely accepted all over the world that smokeless tobacco agents mostly cause mouth cancer but smoking usually causes lung cancer. Still, there are cases of people in India and even in Kashmir who have lung cancer even though they had not consumed any smoking or non-smoking product. Thus it is not only the eating habit, which may lead to cancer, although in the majority of cases, it is true but there are genetic causes also. The off-springs of individuals suffering from cancer are more susceptible to cancer because of certain mutations.
KL: Were your findings accepted by the market and what was the response from academia?
MAM: During my PhD days, we ran a clinical trial in the department of biochemistry and the department of head and neck Surgery of AIIMS. Patients with head and neck cancer were given Curcumin and the effects were studied. I found out that curcumin prevents cancer to some extent. It also reduces the size and recurrence /regrowth of cancer.
KL: After completing the successful clinical trials, things usually move to the pharma sector. Is there any such thing based on clinical trials that the market was triggered by your findings?
MAM: In India, clinical trials were done for curcumin and there are even curcumin derivative compounds in the market that are used as cancer-preventive agents. In the advanced and late stages of cancer, these compounds are not effective but they help in preventing the occurrence of cancer at the early stages.
KL: You did your Postdoc in the USA, What was your research about, and what were the major takeaways from that?
MAM: Initially I worked on pancreatic cancer under the mentorship of Dr Surinder Batra. There, I recapitulated the findings of my PhD work, that is how the natural compounds can prevent the development of cancer and decrease cancer-causing active signalling pathways present in head and neck cancer. I attempted to use the same for pancreatic cancer. My other colleague was working on a molecule called Mucin (MUC4). The findings of my PhD proved that Guggulsterone decreases the expression of Mucin/MUC4.
Expression of Muc4 in the cells increases the tendency of having more aggressive and proliferative cancer. My research study was to reduce the proliferation (Metastasis) and aggressiveness of cancer cells using Guggulsterone.
After that, I created a group of dedicated people to study head and neck cancer. I also came to know that MUC4 is expressed in around 90 per cent of cancer patients, and it causes drug resistance against cancer with time. I came to know that MUC4 is an important factor in the development and metastasis of both pancreatic as well as head and neck cancer.
Dr Muzaffar A Macha (WCCMM-IUST)
KL: What was the follow-up of your research? You must be in touch with the labs still because the scientific community remains in touch with each other. Has there been any kind of formal movement to what you did during your Postdoc?
MAM: No one worked on the MUC4 for quite a long time, but when I was inducted as an Assistant Professor, I started to work on one more molecule called NR4A2 (a transcription factor). I concluded that this molecule has a major role in causing intense pain during cancer. I along with other colleagues are working to design an inhibitor against it. We have identified three inhibitors and we are going to publish this very soon. Inhibitors reduce pain across all cancer patients to a very large extent.
Besides, we found that the pain in pancreatic cancer due to the Perineural-invasion (i.e., Cancer cells penetrate into the nerve cells), is also because of the NR4A2 molecule and can be cured with the help of inhibitors.
KL: You are currently working at the Watson-Crick Center for Molecular Medicine of the IUST. What is your individual research focus there?
MAM: In Kashmir particularly, gastrointestinal tract cancers like oesophageal cancer, stomach cancer, and colorectal cancer are more common in people among all the cancers. Kashmir has the third highest number of oesophageal cancer patients all over the world after China and some areas of Iran.
Although there has been a lot of research work on colorectal cancer and oesophageal cancer, but the actual biology and high throughput technology have not been used here in Kashmir until now. We still do not have the cell-line models and animal models which are necessary to study cancer.
My current project under the Ramalingaswami Fellowship is to develop in-vitro models in order to better study oesophageal and gastric cancers. These models can be used to study the underlying biology and molecular biology of cancer.
KL: Since your Centre is newly established, what is the present state and status of its infrastructure?
MAM: The Watson-Crick Centre for Molecular Medicine started in 2018 but the faculty recruitment was done in 2020. I along with my colleagues like Dr Rais and Dr Arsheed joined in 2020. We started from zero. There was very little infrastructure around and within less than two years, we achieved a great feat. It is all with the help from the higher authorities at the IUST. We now are at the stage of working at an extensive pace and for longer durations. Earlier we had the limitation of culture rooms here but now we almost have everything to do full-fledged research.
KL: Do you have the limitation of any major equipment because high-end research essentially needs sophisticated machinery?
MAM: We do not have high-end and high-throughput machinery, but we have basic instruments. We have procured many instruments and machines and we are in the process of procuring many other. We have an allotment of around Rs 6 crore of funding grants of which Rs 1 crore is for procuring instruments. Projects that require high-end instruments are mostly being done in collaboration with other departments or are outsourced.
KL: Many times more than one university work on the same research topic, but every university has a different vision and different priority. Is any other institution in Kashmir working on the same topic as you do?
MAM: As such, there is only one scientist at Sheri Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences working on the in-vitro models, but I do not know what stage has he reached. Importantly it is worth knowing whether you have the expertise for the research or not. During my Postdoc and Assistant professorship, I have personally made many in-vitro models, so I have the expertise to carry forward that work in our Center at the IUST.
