According to the new head of Roche Diagnostics for India and South Asia, Lance Little, “60 to 70 per cent of the clinical decision that a doctor is making is based on diagnostic results. Yet, less than two per cent of healthcare expenditure is spent on diagnostics. So, there is a huge opportunity here for any country, including India, to maximise the use of diagnostics within the healthcare environment. We have got very good high-end labs, which are equivalent to any country around the world. To look at the laboratories here, we have got somewhere between 40,000 – 60,000 labs in the country but only approximately 400 labs are National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL)-accredited.”
The Business Standard newspaper asked Lance
Any specific areas you would be focusing on [to make a difference and an improvement among the labs]?
There are a couple of specific areas where I see an unmet medical need here in India. One of them is blood screening. In the blood screening environment, there are two layers of testing that ensures safe blood donations. The first layer is in place in India, the second layer which is the standard practice now globally is considered the way to manage safe blood and ensure blood when donated into patients when needed is the safest possible. This second layer is the NAT testing, Nucleic Acid Testing. NAT is a more sensitive blood test which is able to detect infections before antibodies are produced, as it detects the genetic materials of viruses. This is critical when you consider less than 5 per cent of blood banks in India are using the NAT technology.
There is another area of unmet medical need is cervical cancer, which is number one cancer killer for women in India. Globally, more than 25 per cent of the women with cervical cancer reside in India. We have a standard screening test called Pap smear, but that has its limitation. What we are bringing in India is the new technology utilising the DNA type technology, targeting the virus that contributes to pre-cancer of cervical cancer.
