An Indian biotechnology initiative claimed a significant advancement in early cancer detection, which could make the diagnosis of the disease significantly better and save millions of lives by regulating agencies as early as this year’s end.
Mumbai’s nanotechnical scientist, Vinay Kumar Tripathi, both from Epigeères Biotechnology and Singapore-based Tzar Labs, have reported their results in a peer-reviewed journal in Berlin with a 100% efficacy.
“We intend to bring this technology to India first and our aim is to have it introduced by the end of the year. This is of course something that needs regulatory approval and we are talking to the right parties in the country,” Ashish Tripathi said.
The family has decided to call the procedure HrC after Dr. Tripathi’s son-in-law and former high-profile Mumbai police officer Himanshu Roy, who died by suicide in 2018 while battling cancer.
“Our technology can detect any type of cancer. There are around 180 types of cancers that are known to man. Twenty-five is mentioned (in the first published paper) because those were the number of cancers that were covered in the clinical trial,” Ashish Tripathi said.
His brother Anish Tripathi said it was very easy to take the test and it could detect signs of cancer years before the symptoms show up. It currently takes 3-4 days to get the results but automation advancements can bring it down to 2 days, he said.
“Most tests are invasive. This is a very simple test. You go for a blood test, it’s non-invasive. You give a sample of 5 ml of your blood. And we run a test on that,” Anish Tripathi said.
Asked about pricing, they said, “We are going to keep it extremely low. That’s the ethos of the company. We want this test to be made available to every individual and we want it to be affordable. The ambition is a world where all of us just need to do the HrC test just once a year and we will catch the cancer at Stage 1 or before.”
Amish Tripathi, a best-selling author, congratulated Ashish and Anish on their success on Twitter.
More global clinical trials are planned for Ashish and Anish Tripathi’s procedure, and they hope to offer the HrC test under their companies’ brands.
