Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of disease and death in India. About 63,000 new lung cancer cases are detected and about 52,000 people die of lung cancer every year in the country. As oncologists say, every cancer is different. Though lung cancer is often brought on by smoking tobacco the chances of getting lung cancer are influenced by one’s genes. Genetic mechanisms also determine how the incidence and progression of lung cancer in a certain population may be different from that in another population. The difference in these genetic mechanisms can determine how different patients need to be treated.
This year, cancer researcher Amit Dutt won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for medical sciences for identifying genetic mutations that occur specifically in Indian lung cancer patients. Dutt is a principal investigator at the Integrated Cancer Genomics Laboratory located at the Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer that is attached to Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai. He has a PhD in Plant Genetics from Jamia Milia Islamia University for the work carried out at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Delhi and a PhD in Developmental Biology from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He completed his postdoctoral studies in cancer genomics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, United States. In 2010, he joined ACTREC at Tata Memorial Center where he started his own independent research group.