"Technology will play a significant role in reducing numbers of new cases and deaths"

‘Close the care gaps’ – a bold theme set for 2022-2024 World Cancer Day campaigns that fall on February 4 each year – intends to make a huge difference in delivering cancer care to the people.

- Anusha Ashwin

For 2023, an extended theme ‘Uniting our voices and taking action’ exhorts that meaningful steps must be taken to reduce cancer incidence and make early diagnosis more accessible. Bearing the theme in mind, BioSpectrum India connected with Raja Sekhar Kommu, Co-Founder and CTO, Karkinos Healthcare, whose company is leveraging new-age technologies to take evidence-based action in democratising cancer care. Edited excerpts;

The 2020 International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) GLOBOCAN’s cancer statistics reports that there were an estimated 19.3 million new cases of cancer and almost 10 million deaths from cancer. How can intervention by new age technologies make a difference to these numbers? 

We have to pay attention to both the numbers here - number of new cases and number of deaths. The reason for such alarming numbers is because of the lack of awareness about cancer, lack of accessibility of cancer care and poor affordability of treatment. In most cases, cancer gets detected in the late stage making it very difficult for oncologists to save lives.

Technology, therefore, has a significant role to play to improve both the numbers. With the help of technology, one can leverage existing distribution networks to increase the awareness about cancer, thereby nudging the population to go for periodic checks for assessing their individual risk for common cancers. In addition, with advances in technologies the diagnosis for cancer is moving from invasive to non-invasive techniques such as liquid biopsy. It is possible to screen and diagnose large populations at a fraction of cost. Both these result in improving the overall new cases and helps move the needle from illness construct to wellness construct.