Kolkata: Indian doctors seem hopeful about Donald Trump’s $500 billion AI infrastructure project to cure cancer but are also doubtful whether it can outperform all existing treatment methods and offer a superior and affordable alternative.
In India, where the disease’s burden is still a major public health problem, questions of sustainability are also being raised considering the time and money involved in such treatment. According to Dr Prasenjit Chatterjee, Radiation Oncologist at Manipal Hospital: “AI has kept the boarding train at the right time to reach the destination. AI is the first to revolutionise the Indian healthcare market in various ways. It can help develop personalised medicine and early diagnosis, boost telemedicine and remote patient monitoring and more concerning clinical decision support. AI can power the predictive and molecular analytics of telemedicine and personalised medicine to identify individuals highly prone to this disease.” As per medical sources, even though AI-powered technologies have demonstrated promise in improving the precision and effectiveness of cancer diagnosis, therapy and prognosis, Indian physicians remain sceptical about the precision and viability of using AI to treat cancer on a wide scale. Dr Chatterjee added: “While AI is undoubtedly an excellent player, it may not be a good master in terms of healthcare. Since ethical food habits, dietary patterns and other factors vary greatly in India, data validation and standardisation are crucial. The type of cancer people in a given location may develop can differ from that of people in other locations. It is difficult to use mathematics and algorithms to determine the current diagnosis and treatment results.”
Doctors believe that AI has the potential to revolutionise cancer treatment by facilitating the development of personalised therapies. By analysing a patient’s genomic profile and other relevant data, AI-powered systems can identify the most suitable treatment options, including targeted therapies and immunotherapies, focusing on the individual’s specific cancer type and genetic makeup.
Prof. (Dr.) Aloke Ghosh Dastidar, senior consultant of Radiotherapy and Oncology at Ruby General Hospital, said: “AI is believed to perform better than the conventional methods of testing. It fundamentally works based on a large database by analysing all the details to generate further treatment procedures. More the data used for programming, the more error-free the result is expected to be. A country like India with vastly populated and variable patients would show better results by using AI.” Expressing concerns regarding vaccination, he said: “In a country like India, lifestyle modification is more crucial than vaccination. Vaccines cannot access the profiles of every patient; they can only work with a segment of people. But mass vaccination in such a populated country is quite impossible to achieve. However, lifestyle modification with vaccination for the targeted population is performed by identifying the cause and variety of cancer; then only the desirable outcome could be expected.”
Additionally, Larry Ellison, head of the computer business Oracle, claimed that in as little as 48 hours, artificial intelligence (AI) might develop mRNA vaccinations that are specially made to combat cancer in individual patients. Dr Oindrila Biswas, consultant surgical oncologist, Ruby General Hospital, said: “Most oncologists are heading towards precision oncology nowadays. They avoid proceeding with generalized treatment and emphasise need-based treatment on the basis of genetic backups and molecular studies. Since the decoding of genetic codes was difficult due to a lack of infrastructure, the chances of treatment failure were very common in our country. This US-based initiative follows the same principle by following the genetic coding of a patient to develop a vaccine against cancerous cells.
This proposal seems quite promising yet challenging, as developing a vaccine for an individual patient within 48 hours seems quite a task.”
Dr Prasenjit Chatterjee explained gene or molecular profiling is widely used in cancer treatment; in corporate hospitals, 10% of patients receive molecular profiling despite their doctor’s recommendation. Patients avoid it because of its unaffordable market price. Furthermore, it takes a long time for these profilings to produce data and recommend a commercially accessible targetable medicine which is extremely time-consuming and costly. If AI can be employed as a commercial platform to treat the condition, these problems will be mostly resolved. It can be completed in a far more cost-effective manner in a lot less time.
Prof. (Dr.) Aloke Ghosh Dastidar is learnt to have said that because medical science and medical commerce are so closely related, it can be challenging to keep the consistent demand for specific drugs or treatment methods alive for a long period. A treatment or therapy may eventually be replaced by a better, more cost-effective one due to the ongoing advancements in medical science. Dr Oindrila Biswas believes that even if the project succeeds, developing such a setup in a populous country like India will take time. Only if it is advantageous for the majority of cancer cases in India on a mass level — which is now too early to predict — would it be economically advantageous. With ongoing advancements, AI may eventually play a crucial role in curing cancer by integrating real-time monitoring, AI-driven immunotherapies and fully automated treatment solutions.