Two doctors, a battle, and a victory against cancer: Behind India’s low-cost CAR T-cell therapy

An IIT professor and a doctor at Tata Memorial have developed a low-cost version of a breakthrough treatment. Their mission now: To make it accessible to all.

It began with a simple Google search. In 2015, Dr Gaurav Narula, 58, a paediatric haematologist-oncologist at Tata Memorial Hospital, was hoping for a breakthrough in immunology research. He’d quit the Navy in 2012 to pursue oncology and was focused on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, a personalised cancer treatment that used each patient’s blood, specifically its T-cells (types of immune cells), genetically modifies these cells in the lab to give them cancer-fighting powers, and then infuses those CAR-T