In Pakistan, imported drugs (chemo) used in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, especially breast cancer, have been found to be ineffective in the majority of cases. This claim has been made by scientists based on scientific research conducted at the Jameel-ur-Rehman Center for Genome Research, University of Karachi.
This claim, based on research, states that Pakistan’s genetic picture and its genes related to breast cancer are completely different from the genes of the countries from which these drugs are being imported. In the countries of the Western world from which breast cancer drugs are being imported, clinical trials of these drugs are also being conducted on the genes of those countries, while in Pakistan, these drugs are being used without any clinical trials on the genes of this country.
This was stated by Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed, Associate Professor at IBCCS, University of Karachi and leader of the active research team on cancer genomics, to “Express”. Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed said that there are many options in the therapies available for breast cancer, but all the drugs that are being used in Pakistan are being made in Western countries and clinical trials for the approval of these drugs are also being conducted there, while there is a lot of difference in genetics between the two regions and this difference has also been clearly revealed in our research study.
He said that we tested a well-known chemotherapy drug on both the Pakistani origin cell line and the European origin cell line, after which its results on the Pakistani breast cancer cell line were extremely low.
He said that the cancer rate in Pakistan, and especially the breast cancer rate, is very high, while our population pool here also consists mostly of young people, so there is a need for a large-scale research study in cancer genetics because at present we have pockets of data related to breast cancer.
He added that when a large-scale study is conducted in this regard, we will also know our genetic needs and will be able to say which drugs we should validate.
A researcher present on the occasion, Samra Khan, said that Pakistan ranks seventh in breast cancer in South Asia, while Pakistan ranks fifth in mortality rate. Breast cancer in Pakistan is mostly reported in women between the ages of 30 and 45. Treatment guidelines and data from European countries are being used for them, while the breast cancer types BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 are very different between Pakistan and Europe.
On this occasion, the remaining researchers of the research team, Dr. M. Shakeel, Warda Qureshi and Humaira Saleem, said that in patients who are responding to chemo, the disease is returning before its expected lifespan.
It should be noted that according to the Global Cancer Observatory, an organization working under the World Health Organization (WHO), 23% of the types of cancer in the world are breast cancer.
In South Asia, this number is 20 percent, while in Pakistan alone, this number is 31 percent. That is, 31 percent of cancer patients in Pakistan are women suffering from breast cancer. However, according to the Observatory, this data has been taken only from the province of Punjab, and the other three provinces are not included.
