: Indian Surgeons Groundbreaking Cancer Research Saves the Lives of 1000s of Women #IndiaNEWS #Cancer When Lady Meherbai Tata died of leukaemia on 18 June 1931, her husband, Sir Dorabji Tata, Jamsetji

Indian Surgeons Groundbreaking Cancer Research Saves the Lives of 1000s of Women #IndiaNEWS #Cancer
When Lady Meherbai Tata died of leukaemia on 18 June 1931, her husband, Sir Dorabji Tata, Jamsetji Tata’s son and a key figure of the Tata Group endowed the Lady Tata Memorial Trust with a corpus for research into leukaemia in memory of his wife. He set out to establish high-quality facilities for cancer treatment in India.
(Images above of Dr. Indraneel Mittra and a representational photo of middle-aged women. )
Out of this humanitarian commitment emerged the now well-renowned Tata Memorial Hospital, commissioned by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust on 28 February 1941.
Today, the Tata Memorial Centre, under whose aegis the Tata Memorial Hospital operates, is comparable to any such centre in the world. Over the years, the centre has achieved much in cancer treatment and research, besides producing some of India’s finest surgeons, thanks to the far-sighted and complete support of the Department of Atomic Energy, which has taken responsibility for managing this institution since 1962.
One such surgeon is Dr Indraneel Mittra, whose groundbreaking 20-year research into the early detection of breast and cervical cancer in the 1990s saved thousands of lives.
Joining the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1982 as a Consultant Surgeon in the Department of Surgical Oncology, he would go on to set up the first dedicated Breast Unit in India and became the Chief of Breast Cancer Service at the Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH).
In the same year, the Indian Council of Medical Research’s network of cancer registries under the National Cancer Registry Programme (NCRP) began collecting data and providing information on incidence and cancer patterns across the country.
Dr. Indraneel Mittra (Image courtesy IISc)
Embarking on Groundbreaking Research
Responding to The Better India’s queries over email, Dr Gauravi Mishra, a professor at the Department of Preventive Oncology, TMH, talks about what motivated Dr Mittra.
“Being a breast surgeon, he was troubled with women constantly presenting with advanced-stage breast cancer, and he initiated his work to investigate if it was possible to detect them at an earlier stage. However, community-based early detection trials needed funds that were scarce then. According to the Bombay Cancer Registry data back then, 50 per cent of breast cancers were detected in stages III and IV at the time of diagnosis when chances of cure were remote. As many as 21 per cent of women who developed breast cancer in Mumbai died within the first year of diagnosis, suggesting that they already had the metastatic form of the disease,??? says Dr Mishra.
But even before Dr Mittra could embark on his research, there were some structural barriers he had to overcome.

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