The National Cancer Grid (NCG) has established the Koita Centre for Digital Oncology (KCDO) to encourage the use of digital technologies and tools to improve cancer care across India. It will support NCG hospitals in sharing best practices in digital health, adopting digital health tools, and promoting technology initiatives including EMR adoption, healthcare data interoperability, reporting, and analytics.
Cancer care is evolving rapidly, and digital tools are becoming indispensable in improving diagnosis and treatment worldwide. KCDO will play an important role in driving digital transformation across the cancer care continuum. KCDO will also enable NCG hospitals to pilot and adopt new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data, automation, and cloud computing.
Embracing tools like telemedicine and remote patient monitoring will help make care more accessible, especially in semi-urban and rural areas. AI-assisted clinical decision support tools will help improve doctors’ ability to provide better care, and mobile patient engagement apps will help patients with medication management and better compliance with care guidelines. Similarly, the use of healthcare data analytics across hospitals will enable the tracking and benchmarking of clinical outcomes and the effectiveness of different treatment and care pathways.
KCDO will also partner with academic and research organisations to promote research and development in cancer care. According to an industry representative, the centre will create an innovation ecosystem across hospitals, healthcare technology companies, academic institutions, and research organisations to address challenges in cancer care. The new centre will enable more than 270 NCG partner hospitals to assess and deploy digital tools to enhance cancer care and make it more accessible and affordable across India.
NCG is a government initiative, deployed through the Department of Atomic Energy, to create a network of cancer centres, research institutes, patient groups, and charitable institutions from around the country. The objective is to develop uniform standards of patient care for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. The organisation also provides specialised training and education in oncology and facilitates collaborative basic, translational, and clinical research in cancer.
The development of technology in cancer care in the country has accelerated over the past few years. In July, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-Madras) developed PIVOT, an AI-based tool that can predict cancer-causing genes. PIVOT uses a model that utilises information on mutations, expression of genes, and copy number variation in genes and perturbations in the biological network that results from an altered gene expression. The tool applies machine learning to classify genes as tumour suppressor genes, oncogenes, or neutral genes. PIVOT successfully predicted both the existing oncogenes and tumour-suppressor genes like TP53, and PIK3CA, among others, and new cancer-related genes such as PRKCA, SOX9, and PSMD4.
As OpenGov Asia reported, cancer, being a complex disease, cannot be dealt with in a one-treatment-fits-all fashion. As cancer treatment increasingly shifts towards personalised medicine, models like PIVOT, which aim at pinpointing differences between patients are very useful. Current cancer treatments are known to be detrimental to the overall health of the patient. Knowing the genes responsible for the initiation and progression of cancer in a patient can help determine the combination of drugs and therapy most suitable for their recovery.
