Bengaluru, 29th July 2024: The Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB) organised a 2-day symposium titled ‘Women in Systems Oncology’ in coordination with the Param Hansa Centre for Computational Oncology at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore at the IBAB campus in the Electronic City. More than 100 delegates including students from IITs, IISc, IISERs and other engineering colleges, cancer researchers, industry professionals and clinicians across the country participated in the meeting. The meeting was addressed by a star line-up of speakers from academia and industry and had a panel discussion including expert clinicians from top hospitals around.
The meeting was inaugurated by Dr. Geetha Manjunath, Founder, CEO and CTO of Niramai Analytix, a Bengaluru based company that has developed a breast cancer screening technology using Artificial Intelligence. Addressing the gathering, she stressed on the need for serving the society through technology and the need for developing tools for cancer screening that aids early-stage diagnosis to prevent progression of cancer especially in a country like India where extensive screening programmes do not exist. The non-invasive thermal imaging technology developed by Niramai Analytix has been deployed in several nations across the globe for breast cancer screening. The recent National Family Health Survey of India reports that breast, oral cavity, and cervix-uteri cancers are the most prevalent cancers in India contributing to more than 4 lakh cases per year in the country. This is also because of the very small percentages (< 2%) of women and men undergoing screening in India.
Prof. D. Sundar, Director of IBAB, underlined the need for interdisciplinary efforts to foster cancer research. Mr. Rakesh Kumar, Director of Param Hansa Philanthropies, emphasised that extensive programmes focusing on capacity building and training on frontier inter-disciplinary areas are of prime importance to create a critical pool of young researchers who can solve crucial research problems in oncology. Prof. Vijayalakshmi Mahadevan (IBAB) and Prof. Mohit Kumar Jolly (IISc) were the co-conveners for the meeting.
The symposium elaborately discussed the need for discussing cancer screening programmes, insights from longitudinal studies on breast cancer, epigenetic correlates of cancer progression and the need to leverage Real-World Data and AI to revolutionize clinical research and to move from bench to bed. The symposium also offered a hands-on workshop for participants on using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud for analysing cancer genomic data, and a demonstration of Spatial Transcriptomics Technology by 10X Genomics. The panel discussion and the presentations at the symposia clearly underlined the need for a strong interdisciplinary team science approach to accelerate innovations in diagnosis and therapy. The symposium has also paved way for the formation of a consortium of cancer researchers, oncologists and imaging experts, technologists and computational biologists who would present an integrated solution to cancer diagnosis and therapy.