Our future focus

Our first mission is to study the changes in the immune mechanisms that have led to an abrupt increase in cancer incidence in India. The second one is to study the efficacy of traditional and oriental food supplements in plugging the hole in the immune system to prevent cancer.

The first mission will study the immune profile of patients, who have been affected with breast cancer in India, a disease that has been rampantly increasing since the past decade. The capability of natural killer cells, which are one of the key cancer killing cells, of those individuals who have history of breast in the family and those who don't, will be compared. This will be based on the work by Imai and others, who studied the NK cell profile of a particular population for 11 years and their results showed that lower NK cell profile was associated with an increased risk of cancer.

Our proposed study will throw light on the epigenetics of the immune system and try to find out the extent of the dent that allows this to happen; food habit or environment or any other factor. A state-of-the-art immune profile analysis lab, the first-of-its-kind in the country is to be set by Japanese technical experts in the campus of the SLIMS institute in Pondicherry, in order to accomplish this study.

Our second mission started in Yamanashi University, Japan. It involves studying how we can effectively increase the cancer killing capacity of the NK cells. There are several compounds which can increase immunity. Since we are based in both India and in Yamanashi (the wine capital of Japan), we shall use Indian traditional herbs as well as polyphenol from red wine for the study.