Piramal Enterprises joins hands with Tata Memorial for cancer research

Piramal Enterprises Ltd (PEL) and Tata Memorial Centre (TMC) today announced a collaborative programme for study of cancer to find ways of developing tools for better understanding of the disease and to assess responses to various treatments.

The study will focus on the development of pre-clinical cancer models to enhance the understanding of disease biology, treatment response/resistance and biomarkers as they relate to diagnosis, prognosis and response to drugs, a company statement said.

These models will be based on tumour tissues from cancer patients and are predicted to have better translational relevance than the currently used human cancer cell line models, it said.

This research could lead to new therapies and predict the medicine best suited to treat an individual cancer patient, the release said.

''Our collaboration with Piramal Enterprises addresses a critical need in cancer care, which is widely accessible and cost effective personalised medicine for cancer patients,'' Tata Memorial Centre director Rajendra Badwe said.

''We hope that the insights we gain from this alliance will ultimately lead to new treatment options for cancer patients,'' Swati Piramal, vice chairperson of Piramal Enterprises, said.

Meanwhile, Piramal Healthcare's cancer drug P276 for reduction of serious radiation induced mucositis in patients of head and neck cancer receiving chemoradiation is expected to have moved to Phase III trials.

Piramal Healthcare is reported to have completed Phase II clinical trial of P276 in combination with chemoradiation for the reduction of serious radiation-induced mucositis in patients of head and neck cancer after receiving approval from the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI), following completion of Phase I trials in Canada and India.