Sakal Times
December 09, 2010

Sample this: There are an estimated 633,500 deaths due to cancer in India every year while the United States reports 565,600 deaths.

The yearly cancer diagnosis in India is 948,900 while that figure in the US is 14,37,200.

India and the US, therefore, share similar interest for leveraging and processing bioinformatics data, and to promote exchange of information, knowledge and know-how for finding an answer to cancer.

It is with this objective of Indo-US cooperation for cancer research that the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has announced the second meet on Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) to be held here during December 9-10.

The caBIG, which is an information network, is sponsored by the US-based National Cancer Institute (NCI) and its activities are supervised by the National Cancer Institute Centre for Bioinformatics.

Elaborating on the initiative, C-DAC executive director Hemant Darbari told reporters on Wednesday that cancer continues to present challenges in detection, therapy and long-term care due to several reasons including lack of information. Hence, it is necessary to coordinate efforts and pool expertise.

The two-day caBIG meet will provide an avenue for researchers from the USA and India to share and discuss their research endeavours and also identify areas of collaborative research, he said.

C-DAC, incidentally, has a strong presence in the field of medical informatics. It has developed telemedicine solutions and hospital information systems, among other things.

The C-DAC has developed a mobile telemedicine project for Madia Lab Asia under which a virtual super specialty environment has been created in the villages of five districts in Kerala for early detection of cancer, follow-up consultation and palliative care, Dr Darbari informed.