Medical diagnostics and imaging equipment company GE Healthcare, on Tuesday, said it was jointly investing Rs.720 crore with U.S.-based Cancer Treatment Services International (CTSI) to set up a chain of 25 cancer detection and treatment centres across the country.
$120-m programmeGE Healthcare would put a minor portion into the $120-million programme planned over the next five years, its Chairman and CEO John Dineen told a joint news conference with CTSI officials.
With the new tie-up format, the diagnostics-focussed company had made its closest approach towards treating a disease anywhere in the world.
According to Mr. Dineen, the partnership was a part of its $1-billion commitment to R&D related to diagnosing cancer. Its focus was to make detection and treatment of cancer timely, affordable and easy to get. GE was also developing low-cost diagnostic technologies ‘in India and for India’ for various diseases, 100 of them targeting cancer alone. It recently launched a low-cost version of PET-CT that is widely used to find cancerous tumours.
GE would provide equipment while CTSI, which set up the 250-bed American Oncology Institute in Hyderabad in 2012, would take care of treatment, doctors, medical personnel and related services.
“[This] partnership presents a great opportunity to confront India’s cancer challenge head-on,” Mr. Dineen said.
Terri Bresenham, Bangalore-based President and CEO of GE Healthcare South Asia, said cancer cases, now at three million, were rising sharply in India, and a large number of its victims were dying due to late detection and high cost of treatment. Also, 1.23 million new cases were showing up each year.
GE was exploring a new model of partnership that would be replicated with others. The six products that GE launched in 2013 had on an average cut the cost by 40 per cent. GE planned to bring out another 15 products with similar impact.
CTSI President and CEO Joe Nicholas said the partners planned to start the first few centres in Andhra Pradesh as a hub-and-spoke model, and later try it out in other countries that have similar conditions. The $10-million Hyderabad centre set up in 2012 had so far treated 10,000 people.
New hospitalsThe partners were exploring locations to set up new hospitals and remote centres in small towns as also ‘brownfields’ where they would provide cancer care services in a few existing hospitals.
