The Hindu Business Line : Start-up co offers drug efficacy tests for cancer

Right dosage
The genetic test, at a cost of Rs 3,000, provides the doctor with details of the internal make up of the patient, helping him to prescribe the right drug and the perfect dosage for the individual.

Our Bureau

New Delhi, Feb. 11 With genetic testing gaining ground in the country, cancer treatment may become much safer. Though it is known that due to genetic differences body response to a drug could vary from 25 per cent to 99 per cent, oncologists have been using a hit and miss method when treating cancers as it was not possible to determine the efficacy of a drug on an individual patient,

However, all that is likely to change with start up company Acton Biotech (India) offering genetic tests for drug specificity and sensitivity. The company has created the only laboratory that offers such pharmacogenomic tests in India, with its first testings being for cancer.

“Currently, we are offering tests to identify patients who are at great risk of developing severe toxicity from commonly used cancer drugs 6 Mercaptopurine and 5 Fluorouracil. We collect samples and analyse them in our laboratory. Our mission is to make chemotherapy safer and effective.

“Slowly we are planning to extend our services to all cancer drugs and then move on to drugs used in diseases like asthma, diabetes, TB, AIDS, cardiovascular and CNS disorders,” says Mr Sandeep Saxena, Founder and CEO, Acton Biotech (India) Pvt. Ltd.

Pharmacokinetics and genetics have identified four types of people. While 60 per cent of the population responds positively to a drug, 25 per cent are fast metabolisers of a drug, which means that the drug gets washed out of the body before it can have any positive effect. Another 10 per cent are slow metabolisers, where the drug will have minor or major side effects because of its accumulation as it is washed out of the system extremely slowly. However, the remainder 5 per cent of patients show undetectable or no enzyme activity, hence, the drug taken keeps accumulating in the patient’s body, resulting in severe side reactions.

“The genetic test, at a cost of Rs 3,000, provides the doctor with details of the internal make up of the patient, helping him to prescribe the right drug and the perfect dosage for the individual. In the case of cancer, so far doctors used to start with a 100 per cent dose for all patients and then reduce the dose for patients who could not tolerate it. However, in doing this, there is a big risk of severe side effects and also death.

“We do a DPD test for cancer patients about to take 5FU and Xeloda. If the patient has a mutation, the doctor changes the drug as the patient is at a very high risk of developing life threatening toxicity. Our research shows that 4 per cent of the country’s population carries this mutation,” explains Mr Saxena.

Formed with a seed funding of Rs 50 lakh, Acton Biotech currently caters primarily to Maharashtra and Gujarat, but hopes to scale up operations soon to include the North and the South of the country.

More Stories on : Health

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page