The Artemis Health Institute, Gurgaon, has entered a tie-up with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre of New York. This is the 125-year-old US institute’s maiden venture in India.

The tie-up will cover the areas of clinical care, research and education, Artemis chief executive officer Dr Kushagra Kataria said. Work will be underway by next March, he said.

The two institutes will set up an exchange programme for physicians, nurses and clinicians and Sloan-Kettering’s doctors will be available to patients of Artemis for consultation, it was informed. The collaboration will also include sharing and improvement of cancer protocols, staff training, clinical trials and population research projects on prevalence and propensity of various types of cancers.

Dr Yuman Fong, vice-chairman (technology development) in the Department of Surgery of Sloan-Kettering, said, “For Sloan-Kettering, it means a scope for more involvement in clinical care, developing and sharing algorithms of care and learning methods of cost-effective patient care.”

For example, in the US, diagnostic procedures are expensive and a lot of unnecessary tests are conducted once a patient is admitted, Fong said. But these procedures are more streamlined and focussed in India. “We have a lot to learn in that area,” said Fong, who recently visited Delhi to chalk out a roadmap for the collaboration.

Also, the larger patient pool and a greater experience of ethnicity are expected to help develop more effective means of treatment. “We can observe and detect what works across big cross sections of population, different races, and concentrate on those methods and treatments,” Fong said

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