Several laboratories and hospitals in the city are setting up facilities for advanced cancer tests, a move that will reduce the waiting time and the cost patients or families have to bear when samples are sent outside Bengal for analysis.
Doctors and pathologists said many of the advanced tests were not performed in Kolkata now. Samples collected from patients at diagnostic centres across the city are sent to laboratories outside the state for complex tests.
This creates several challenges. “Sending samples by air to another state always carries the risk of a particular sample getting misplaced or mixed with someone else’s sample. Such risks will be reduced if tests are conducted here. The turnover time and the cost will come down, too,” a doctor said.
Suraksha Laboratories, which has been conducting advanced tests like FISH or BRCA for about a year, has recently introduced a range of advanced tests for blood cancer.
Somnath Chatterjee, a director of Suraksha Laboratories, said the turnaround time would reduce with the introduction of the blood cancer tests. “We are also introducing the next-gen sequencing (NGS) test. It can identify the mutations responsible for cancer in a person,” he said.
Treatment can be more specific and personalised if the mutations responsible for cancer can be detected, Chatterjee said.
Many hospitals with cancer units are yet to start FISH, an advanced test for cancer. As samples are sent outside the state, the results take about two weeks to come.
Medica Superspecialty Hospital plans to start FISH by the end of this month. “We are setting up the equipment and tests will start in our hospital by the end of February. We will be able to hand in the results within three days,” said Ayanabh Deb Gupta, joint managing director of Medica.
Chatterjee said Suraksha would offer all cancer tests under one roof. “Earlier, all our centres did not do all tests. Now a patient can walk into any of our centres and get all the tests done,” he said.
“We will soon start BRCA I and II tests, which are advanced tests for breast and ovarian cancer, at the RN Tagore hospital,” said Devmalya Banerjee, head of the oncology pathology department of Narayana Health Cancer Centre. Narayana Health owns the hospital.