Rohit Shishodia

In a path breaking initiative to provide affordable cancer care, Delhi State Cancer Institute (DSCI) has signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to perform large-scale validation of the patented TEPScan test on 15,000 cancer patients over the next five years.

This collaboration will provide benefits for the masses as TEPScan is built on a cutting-edge, genomics, and artificial intelligence-backed liquid-biopsy technology that allows rapid, reliable, and reproducible detection of cancer from blood at a very economical cost.

TEPScan technology allows both early diagnoses and holds promises for prognosis and evaluating therapy effectiveness, including the timely detection of the cancer relapse, a most frequent phenomenon critical for cancer management.

 “We are very glad to partner with CareOnco Biotech and see a lot of potential in TEPScan™ and are happy to see a technology that has been made in India by an Indian group of scientists. DSCI will help in validating the use of TEPScan in multiple use cases from diagnosis to prognosis. We also see a huge benefit to patients since this is a low-cost, least invasive and reliable test, and can be performed within limited laboratory facilities since it leverages the ubiquitously present Real-Time PCR machines (RT-PCR)” Dr. Kishore Singh, Director of DSCI, said.

Ms Rupa Mitra, Founding Director, CareOnco Biotech, said, “Our mission is to help people get treatment at the correct stage of the disease. Early diagnosis of cancer offers the best chance for successful treatment. We are striving to solve this problem and look forward to working with DSCI to make this a reality.”

Dr Debarka Sengupta, Associate Professor, Dept Of Computational Biology and Comp. Science at IIIT-D, Chief Scientific Advisor, CareOnco Biotech, said, “As the inventor of the test, I am extremely proud to see this validation exercise with DSCI coming through. With samples from 15,000 patients across various cancer types, we will be sitting on a goldmine of useful data and would be in a position to revolutionize the liquid biopsy-based cancer screening space."

Dr Gaurav Ahuja, Assistant professor, dept. Of Computational Biology at IIIT-D | Principal Advisor, Lab Operations at CareOnco Biotech, said that TEPScan™ is Rapid, Reliable, and Reproducible. It is the least invasive molecular test that may drastically reduce the cancer burden of our country.”

It may be noted that it costs around one lakh to detect different cancers but patients are expected  to pay Rs 8000-10000 for this test.  

“The accuracy of this test is 95 per cent compared to 50 per cent in currently available test in the other countries .It is expected that in future, the accuracy will be 99 per cent. This test is capable of finding all types of cancer. It will not be an exaggeration that this test will be a boon for early detection of different types of cancer and it will help us to save more lives especially for new types of cancer where no screening is available,” DSCI in a statement.