Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes to Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity. Each week on the show I introduce guests from around the world who are in some way experts in the field of integrative oncology, an approach that combines the best of both conventional care and lifestyle and complementary care to address the needs of those with cancer in the most holistic way. My guest this week is based in India and I’m very keen to delve further into the culture of cancer care in India of how integration is progressing and finding acceptance there. I’m speaking to Arpan Talwar over the internet.

Arpan Talwar
Great to be here, Robin.

Robin Daly
Lovely. So you’re talking to me from the Art of Healing Cancer Clinic, which I believe is located near New Delhi. Is that right?

Arpan Talwar
We are based in a small satellite town that is very near to New Delhi called Gurgaon. It’s called, it’s a silicon valley of northern India where you’ll find all the large companies. It’s also a medical tourism hub for north of India. So we are located in Gurgaon which is very close to New Delhi.

Robin Daly
Alright, so the clinic seems to be very integrative in its approach by which I mean that in addition to conventional cancer treatments you have a whole raft of other approaches from yoga to intravenous vitamin C. Within India, how unusual is it to find a clinic offering this sort of range of approaches?

Arpan Talwar
To be very honest, Robin, in my entire years of experience in oncology, I have not find even one clinic in India apart from ours right now, which has a 360-degree approach. You will either find clinics which are run by physicians who do a lot of integrative approaches like IV vitamin C, someone doing hyperbaric oxygen, or other infusions. Or then you have the complete opposite, which is a complete conventional where you do surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiation. I feel we are one of those which integrates everything together. And the reason is that some of the co-founders along with me are oncologists. And their entire career has been into traditional conventional oncology. And along with me, with others, when they saw the great response of integrative approaches, these surgical oncologists, medical oncologists, on board our institution, our clinic, started believing in that and started integrating it with conventional oncology. So we started with more as conventional and now bringing the integrative into conventional, rather than being only integrative.

Robin Daly
Right. Well, that’s great. And of course, that’s the direction that many of us wanted to go. We want to stop this either-or thing and actually get the best of both, which is quite considerable, the benefits that that will bring, which really the either-or can’t possibly do. So yeah, very exciting. But anyway, interesting to just hear what the general scene is in India, you know, in Britain, we don’t have any integrative clinics, I would say, as yet. It’s still either-or here. And I’m very much looking forward to the day when we can offer that sort of thing

Arpan Talwar
So I would just, you know, kind of jump in and, and share that India is not very different from UK. We, India has, India, you know, follows the medical principles and policies set up by the West. So we are very much West oriented. But often, in few years, the new government has brought in policies that protects the doctors from using medicines and drugs, where in case if the patients are stage four cancer patients or end of life patients, where doctors are given us a little bit of liberty now to use drugs. And that’s what is opening up and making the changes coming to the society now. So we are very new into the integrative space in terms of the country in totality. So so now because of the new government, where they’re relaxing a little bit of policies to even import drugs on certain drug licenses, which are very quick to get, you know, now in this in the new paradigm, so you just go to the internet, if you have a doctor prescription, you need a drug integrative oncology drug from let’s say Germany, you can quickly in two hours get a license to import it now. So these things are changing in the new new new way of thinking in India right now. And that’s what makes us a legal entity to offer integrative oncology now.

Robin Daly
Well that’s very interesting and it’s a very tight situation so that kind of loosening up especially in the face of a sort of terminal diagnosis is seems to me completely appropriate and it allows for progress basically for people to try and find a better way forward. How open would you say the public in India are to integrated mental approaches?

Arpan Talwar
So I have seen three types of patient categories right now. I will definitely give a huge round of applause to people like Jane, Abe, Ma, a few others, Daniel, who have been leading it globally. And there are tons of patients within India who have started following them. And when people in India, the educated class who know how to read, write, understand English, the new generation who are internet savvy, who goes to the internet, if there are patients in the family who are terminal patients, they try to find out whatever is available in the world. When they get to those platforms, they somehow get to know about us, and they are open to do integrative oncology. So these are those set of patients, Robin, who come to us and ask for integrative oncology. Though this is a very, very small number right now, but looking at the country with the size of India with 1.4 billion population, a very small number is also a huge number. So there’s this one category of patients who are coming and asking for integrative oncology. There is a second category of patients with us who come to us and are terminal. They have heard about us now, and they are terminal. And they come here asking that we have heard that you guys do a little different treatment from the others, and people are getting a good response. I’ll give you an example. We have a glioblastoma patient who was given three months and sent to hospice in the conventional oncology around, around, I don’t remember exactly, but it should be somewhere a little more than one and a half years. Now that patient came to us, and obviously that patient was progressing on chemotherapy drugs like temozolomide, Avastin, which is a VEGF inhibitor, and here they had nothing. So obviously we had experience with some of the drugs which crosses brain blood barrier like 2DG, which are new in the country, and India is the only country where 2DG is an approved medicine by the Indian Council of Medical Research. But that is only oral, which is approved. So we, for this particular patient, imported intravenous 2DG from Germany, added into the patient’s treatment protocol, along with that, added a little bit more integrative approaches like hydrogen inhalation therapy. Hydrogen is also a very light element that crosses the brain blood barrier. And last one and a half years, the patient has, the entire edema from the brain has gone. The patient’s tumor, every three months they get an MRI done, every three months, we either find a stable disease, or five to six percent reduction in the tumor size. So though the patient still has the tumor, but the patient is alive and back to the normal life, which in the conventional they were only given a few years. So this is the second category of patients who come to us who doesn’t know what we do, but are very inquisitive about asking if there’s anything beyond this. The third category of patients are the patients who do not at all trust us, because we would be treating 0.1% of the population in India. Trusting 0.1% versus what 99.9% of the doctors in the world are saying, we do get our set of prejudices in the country as well.

Arpan Talwar
And people do believe that integrative oncology is hooks. They start trust, and I have incidences in my time of running the institution where patients who were stage one or stage two did not come to us, didn’t come for a consultation once, but did not come again after that, but returned back to us after they were stage four. And then that’s when the trust comes in. I think that’s what I think would be in other parts of the world as well, but it’s just a start. We’re sitting at a start of integrative oncology in the country, so we do feel a lot of pushback as well. But we are kind of trying to find our, I would say our legal ways and legal ways to sail through in this territory so that one, we can do the good that we want to do. We can offer integrative oncology, and we can still be at the safer side of the system here.

Robin Daly
Right. Very good. And I mean, you described it as being sort of fundamentally Western system, but within that, what’s the place of traditional Indian medicine these days?

Arpan Talwar
Can you elaborate the question that a little bit more?

Robin Daly
I mean, how do the public relate to Ayurveda and yoga and meditation and all the traditional Indian approaches? Do they still have a popular place?

Arpan Talwar
Absolutely. And that’s a very important question, Robin, because we are sitting at a time where our current government has in fact created a new ministry. So we used to have something called as Ministry of Health earlier. Now we have something called as another ministry called Ministry of Ayush. Now Ministry of Ayush has been found, imagine you have a Ministry of Defence and you have a Ministry of Ayush as big as a ministry, which the task of this ministry is to promote Indian Ayurveda not just in the country, but across the world. That’s where it was this industry who created Yoga Day and it was taken to the UN to be formulated as a day in the year. Now there is huge, huge, huge push by the government to find modalities of treatment within Ayurveda in almost all types of diseases, including cancer. Like you have, let’s say, imagine you have a repository and you have publications like Science Magazine or Science Direct or Nature Magazine and you have a repository of these research papers on PubMed. Ministry of Ayush also has tons of repository of papers, research papers that are only focused or only funded by Ministry of Ayush. I was looking the other day, how many research papers have been published in Ayurveda? There are more than around 30,000 papers published in the last eight years funded by Ministry of Ayush, specifically on cancer right now. So there’s a huge push. Every cancer patient in India wants to definitely adopt a different lifestyle. They always definitely ask whether there is something in Ayurveda that could be merged with my conventional modalities of treatment so that I could get a better response. So with every passing day, I would say it is a patient-driven initiative that everyone has started asking for it now. Amazing. I still feel that we are some, we’re still a little away from merging Ayurveda with science, the way conventional science works. I’ll give you an example. In Ayurveda, used to treat patients with something that they should call in Indian Ayurveda has vatpith, which means high inflation, inflammation or low inflammation, something like that. We are still a little away from actually saying that let’s say curcumin, which was actually invented in India, inhibits EGFR as a pathway or VEGF as a pathway as an example. So I think that’s where Ayurveda needs to go to actually target Ayurveda and merge it with today’s science. That’s what I think is a little lacking. But yes, you will find Ayurvedic doctors mushrooming in every part of the country and they’re trying to bring that into the conventional space to whatever limit they could. But that space is growing.

Robin Daly
It’s very heartening to hear because, you know, I’ve been to India a few times myself and I was very aware in the past that India seemed to be rushing to follow the lead of America, you know, all the time. And I was thinking, well, wait a minute, you’ve got these fantastic resources here already. Why aren’t you capitalising on those and bringing those to us? We need them, you know. And so I’m very heartened to hear that’s the case. That’s, you know, to have the government behind it is very, very different.

Arpan Talwar
In fact, while we speak, in fact, today itself, we are connecting with the two companies along with so we along with another research company, we are collaborating for head and neck cancers, head and neck cancer, we call head and neck cancer as the cancer of India because of the large tobacco chain population. And we do not have drugs. Whereas drugs are, you know, invented in US Western countries, and they do not have so much of head and neck cancers. So we are we are working, we will see soon in a month’s time starting a project with this research lab would be building organoids for for head and neck cancers. And and we will give our protocol of natural drugs, whatever we use in our head and neck cancer patient that they would be testing on the organoids to further check how much of the cells are actually you know, there’s what percentage of apoptosis is happening in those cells. And then we would eventually go for a grant with ministry of I used to publish that paper. So yeah, bits and pieces here and there are started to happen now.

Robin Daly
Yeah, marvellous, marvellous. Okay, so I hear there’s a very personal backstory to the setting up of the clinic for you. I just wonder whether you mind telling us about that.

Arpan Talwar
Yes, Robin. So, so it so happened that in 2016, we were expecting a first child, me and my wife. And, and during the sixth month of her pregnancy, it was I still remember to somewhere around 23rd week or so, when she detected a lump, and she went to the guy and she asked her to check on that. And Gany kind of said that, you know, you know, it is very common to have lumps during the during the pregnancy, they’re like fibrodinomas and all that happen often. But four weeks after that, in the 27th week, when when I personally when I was touching the lump, I saw the lump size was almost three times in four weeks. And I was thinking that this is something else. Now we should quickly get it checked. We got an ultrasound done, and they, they still said it’s fibrodinoma, but it should be further evaluated. And we, we then went in for FNAC. We went to an oncologist, a surgical oncologist who quickly performed FNAC on her. And it was, it was, you know, shared with us that this is carcinoma. Obviously, what type we would know only when we get a biopsy done or we have the tissue sample. Obviously, you know, but that was a first child. So it came down as if the whole building was falling down on our head at that time. But we had to do something. So the doctors performed surgery on her during pregnancy, she was in general anesthesia, while monitoring, you know, making sure that the guy needs also there along with the surgical oncologist to make sure that the baby is safe. So the surgery was done fine. Her, you know, she had some lymphatic involvement as well. So it was stage three. But, but, but surgery went on very well in the 29th week. And in the 32nd week, she again went, she was again operated for C-section to remove the baby. So baby was delivered a little earlier so that she could be further treated. Baby is fine. He’s, he’s with me. He is six and a half years old now. And, and around two weeks after the delivery, which was which probably would be the 34th week of pregnancy. And at that time, I knew nothing about cancer, you know, it was it was it was all that, which happened after that. And in 34th week, she was put into chemotherapy and almost, you know, 12 rounds of chemotherapies after that various drugs. Much happened during those 12 rounds, she had anaphylactic reactions I almost lost her during that chemotherapy once because she had a, she had a, you know, the highest grade of anaphylactic reaction that could happen at that time. That was completed, you know, radiation was completed in early 2017. And life went on normal after that, after the radiation, but in the regular check in 2018, we used to get a PET scan done every year just to see all is working well. Year after that in 2018, when we got our PET scan done, we found some formation in the brain. And, and that was a wake up call. That was a wake up call. And obviously, then after that, you know, when when now I realized that, you know, no one no one when when the disease as a first spread from the local site gets to the brain, diseases like breast cancer, scolones and all that’s where now with the experience that we have in last four,

Arpan Talwar
five years, you know, it’s just a matter of time that doctors try, try and perform various, you know, give various drugs, which x could work or y could work. But all in all, when I used to ask how much time do you think she has and I was I was always given, you know, that depends on how much time God gives her, you know, it could be as low as three months of the tumor in the brain, pros or all depends, you know, or it could be six months, nine months, but nine months was the max that I heard ever from any doctor. So that was the master. So so that’s when I thought that you know, something has happened to us and I need to now take charge of the things, you know, no doctor has given me anything. That’s when I started traveling across the world to meet doctors in China, Germany, Mexico, you know, either in person or at times, you know, or calls, you know, meeting them trying to see what could be done, you know, and that’s that’s how slowly and gradually this community started building up across. It was And it was actually before her progression, I somehow had this sense that her disease seems to be aggressive. Because from one centimeter tumor to four and a half centimeter tumor in one month, there doesn’t seem to be a low grade tumor. So I collaborated with the doctor. And I always had that in my mind that I had to be very close with oncology now. Because I need to have doctors along with me who trust me and I trust those doctors. That’s when it happened that post her diagnosis that she’s stage four and she has metastasis in the brain. And when I went across the world, our surgeon who treated my wife, when I showed all those things to my surgeon, he was also very convinced that this is something that is happening around the world. And he’s a great human being. He was one of the doctors. In my first instance, he never should know two things. He said that if five doctors are saying that this is possible, there must be something that we should look into it. And then with him in 2018. So that we could treat my wife and we could treat others as well. In 2018, we founded this institution called Art of Healing Cancer, which was much needed. So that one, my wife has access to all the technologies across the world sitting in India. And every technology that after that I got in India was open to everyone else, every other patient that comes to us. So we collaborated with pharmacies. And so I can tell you at the start of it, it was so difficult to even get IV vitamin C four years back.

Robin Daly
I imagine, yeah.

Arpan Talwar
And now we have access to almost every intravenous solution that could be possible in the world in India now. So every drug coming into the country, it was open to everyone. Now, out of healing cancer today, with the help of certain other researchers and friends, now has the maximum experience on intravenous 2DG now. And, you know, very thankful to Daniel from NCS formulas and Dr. Lam, who is from University of Miami, that they suggested us and shared their protocols. And now we have treated more than 100 patients with 2DG, almost 100 patients with 2DG now. And we have immense results. So with every new drug, new technology coming in, my wife extended life by another six months. And then COVID happened. She was one of the worst infections with COVID. In my family, I had a few members passing away with COVID. But what a strong soul she was that she even dealt with that and came out of that. When I got an antigen test done after that, I got to know my doctors that, you know, she has the antigen levels, which we generally do not see in patients for COVID. So that shows how, and, you know, 2DG was something that worked very well in her case during COVID as well.

Arpan Talwar
Yeah, after that in 2022, in April, she again got another bout of infection and that infection ended up into a septic shock and she passed away after that.

Robin Daly
really very recent. Yeah. And I’m very sorry to hear that. Amazing what you’ve achieved and the thing that strikes me, you know, it’s really striking about is the fact that you weren’t, you were simultaneously helping your wife but actually you’re making this accessible to everybody at the same time. It’s quite enough on your plate to help your own family but it’s amazing what you’ve achieved at the same time in parallel.

Arpan Talwar
Well, Robin, there were so many during the journey, journey, you know, obviously, there were there were groups that I were part of globally, and there were there were a lot of, you know, patient groups that we were part here in India. I feel I was lucky enough to have those, those doctors who collaborated, trusted, and, and together with me, founded Art of Healing Cancer, not everyone was that lucky to have these doctors who could trust, and specifically oncologists who could trust. So I think more than that was even my duty to to anything that is now accessible to me and my family as a drug in India should be available to everyone. And I think that led led to, to, to actually creation of Art of Healing Cancer and. And now we, we get three to four, you know, new fresh cases almost every day you know we treat some we do not treat some, but, but word of mouth is spreading and you know people are coming to us now.

Robin Daly
Well thanks very much for sharing the story, it’s quite a story and I’m very sorry that you’ve suffered the loss at the end of it, but clearly her life has extended enormously by what you did.

Robin Daly
Okay, so can we just talk a bit now about, I mean, it’s clear that your clinic offers a huge range of approaches. Do you want to just sort of run through what’s on offer there and just maybe comment with each on why you’ve particularly included that as one of your offerings?

Arpan Talwar
So Robin, if you remember, when we started the conversation, I was sharing that out of leading cancer, the approach is 360 degree. The basis that the founders are also oncologists. So our core DNA is still the conventional oncology. Not that we do not trust on integrative or we do not trust on conventional. Our core is still the conventional oncology with a belief that you can add things on top of it. You can tweak the conventional oncology by tweaking the dosages. You can add compounds which could reduce, it could remove resistance. And you can create a complete package that makes the treatment work for everyone. So that was the idea, for example. And then I’ll go into what we offer as well. So for example, I gave you an example of glioblastoma patient. We had a, in glioblastomas, we have a limitation of drugs that crosses the brain barrier. And now that we have access to 2DG, why not try 2DG on those patients and get a great response. Though 2DG is, we do not know whether we should call 2DG as integrative or as conventional. This was a drug that was invented as a cancer drug because it’s a glycolytic inhibitor. But no one ever brought this drug into the market because it cannot be patented. So this is integrative approach. It might not just be natural, but anything that could support the patient, we could try to integrate it. I’ll share with you what we actually do and where we are heading as an organization right now. So what we do is that we try to see as an integrative approach, what might work best in what patients. From our research, we found that, let’s say some of the most difficult cancers, let’s say triple negative breast cancer, and I’ll share a case report with you. And that case report will soon be on our website as well in a few days’ time, where we knew that Artisanate is one of the compound that works very well in TNBCs because of certain pathways that are overexposed in TNBC. So we created a protocol for triple negative breast cancer where we said that we would do because the patients are generally, so patients who come to us are late stage, stage four patients. With our experience, I started feeling that at times, only the natural therapy might not work because it can work, but patients also do not follow the protocols very well in natural therapies. So there has to be something that we do that at least take them to a place where they’re out of the danger of losing their lives, and then we can sustain them on the natural therapies. But at least we’ll have to bring them out of the danger of losing their lives right now. So we’ve created a protocol where on day one for this particular, let’s say, TNBC and other TNBC patients as well, what we do is that we do IV vitamin C, we do drugs like pacti-taxil and carboplatin because TNBC has a tendency to go to the brain and carboplatin crosses the brain-blood barrier, and we do IV Artisanate on day one.

Arpan Talwar
Day two, we give a gap. Day three, day four, day five, day six, we again, we do some natural supplements, let’s say high doses of quercetin, high doses of curcumin, quercetin to, let’s say, reduce the MDR overexpression, which is generally very high in triple negative breast cancer, or any other cancer to that matter because the resistance is very high. So we created a cocktail of five core drugs to reduce the resistance and make the chemotherapy more effective. Day seven, we again, we do another IV, if a patient is ready to do that, if the patient body is allowed to do that, we do intravenous 2DG on the seventh day. And on the ninth day, we again do the day one treatment, which is intravenous IVC, intravenous Artisanate, pacti-taxil and carboplatin. In this particular patient, in three cycles of chemotherapy, we have seen near to complete remission in a triple negative breast cancers, which generally is very difficult to see. And we are seeing this very common trend, very common trend in so many different patients now. In so many patients who are not responding to chemotherapies from other doctors, those are the patients who a large population of those patients end up to us. And by simply adding a couple of more does even if you do not do our extensive genome analysis, simply adding a couple of drugs and natural substance to remove the resistance patients start responding to treatments. So though we have a large offering based with us right now, but for every patient, we kind of customize it a little bit to see which one to which patients we, for example, at time, we see that that’s in this particular TNBC patient I was sharing with you had a fun getting breast and fun getting breast was creating sepsis in the body infection in the body. So we have to surgically operate that that that breast and do mastectomy to remove that that that that that fun getting mass because of that that fun getting mass do not create more more infection and there is more infection we can’t treat the body as well. So wherever there is surgery that is needed, we do surgery whenever infusion treatments are needed, like chemotherapies or immunotherapies, we merge it with integrative approaches example that I’ve given to you. And if you feel at times that radiation is necessary, we do radiation as well. A flavor that we add on top of it is a is a deep extensive genome analysis. We even go now at an RNA level, not just at a DNA level, but an RNA level to analyze why a patient is not responding. I’ll again give you an example. There was a there was a head and neck cancer patient who had six rounds of surgeries. And after every round of surgery, there used to be a radiation in the conventional oncology and that patient used to have a recurrence. After six rounds of surgery, you can’t even imagine what his face looks like. It was a head and neck cancer and oral cancer. So the patient was completely demotivated and he didn’t want to even live and was a young soul 36 years old age.

Arpan Talwar
So and we were also not getting answers why this and this patient then after that came to us and we were not getting answers why this patient is not responding. So we took a tissue of his and send it to an extensive DNA and RNA analysis and it is much more extensive than what Foundation One does. So we collaborated with certain labs who gives us the RNA data and our biotech engineers were a part of our company analyzes that RNA data. We found that there was a gene which was responsible and that if that gene is mutated, it was a I’m not remembering the names of STE2 or ST2 something was the name of the gene. I’m not remembering the exact name, but if that gene is mutated, there is a very high tendency of a recurrence post radiation. So in that case, our answer was that if you have to do IVs, infusions, vitamin C, that would definitely be a part of the treatment. But if a surgery needs to be done, only surgery needs to be done, radiation, you should not do radiation in that case, because radiation is conventional oncology built into NCCN guidelines of NCCN of head and neck cancer, do surgery, do radiation, do surgery, do radiation, don’t do radiation. Right. It has a it has a mutation in that some NT2 gene or something. If you do radiation, it will come back on the local area. So we performed a minimal surgery just to reduce the remove the tumor. And then the integrative infusions, IV, vitamin C, artisinate for around eight rounds. The patient is disease free from last one year now.

Robin Daly
Amazing. Amazing. So that’s just those other kind of things that we are doing now. Better information. Absolutely right. Very interesting to hear you talk about the way you’re using the conventional and the other approaches together. Particularly the way you spoke about the need for conventional treatments sometimes. I mean, I’ve always spoken about cancer as being something that has momentum and that if you have a cancer which has a lot of momentum, that’s kind of where conventional treatments excel at actually slaying them up. It stops them in their tracks, a dose of chemotherapy can do, in a way that it’s very hard to do with natural substances. I don’t see it as a long-term effect, but it gives you this space in which to work and to move where you’re no longer your life’s address and you’re able to then do lots of other approaches which are more likely to be successful in the long term. Exactly. So that’s our approach.

Arpan Talwar
Robin that we should use conventional to get that get to that place where the life is not at risk then shift into complete integrative approach after that even during the conventional it has to be integrative conventional but you can shift to completely into natural after that so there was a grandmother of 82 years of age with an ovarian cancer and in the conventional they were asked to do surgery chemotherapy and we were like an 82 year old grandmother she would not survive post chemotherapy itself you know rather than so we didn’t do even we didn’t even do a single piece of conventional treatment for her our idea for her is to keep maintaining her and keep extending her life and making sure that the disease is either either the disease stops the progression stops or we can slowly and gradually bring the disease down after that with with non-conventional therapies so an 82 year old grandmother is not you know body is not

Robin Daly
Yeah, it does make sense. I agree. I’ve seen people who basically have just died from the treatment. When they’re treated that age, it seems clear they just go downhill straight away. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But I mean, the other thing you’re highlighting by what you said is just the extraordinary effect that a few natural substances can have when they’re combined with regular treatments. You know, the reduction of side effects and the increase in the performance of the conventional treatments is striking and very striking considering what simple interventions you’re adding in.

Arpan Talwar
Absolutely, absolutely. And now, you know, you say what you’re saying is absolutely correct. We have now slowly and gradually some of the, you know, protocols, which we are seeing supportive in almost every types of cancer, we are making it mandatory. So every, if there is a chemotherapy that has to be done, it has to be low dose. If there’s a chemotherapy that has to be done, it has to be with IV vitamin C supportive. If a, if a particular cancer response to artisanate, artisanate has to be a part of that particular treatment. So for us, even if you do not do any kind of analysis like RGCC or anything else, even if you do not do that, these things are standard of care for us now, you know, any, any stage of cancer standard of care.

Robin Daly
very interesting. So you say you’re always using low-dose chemo that you’re you’re feeling that actually that is the the most effective way to use it.

Arpan Talwar
Absolutely no doubt about that, you know, metronomic low doses are the way to be, you know, how low is low that depends on the doctor and on a patient to patient, but metronomic low doses are the way to go. And there’s enough data to support that. The data does say that metronomic chemotherapy has much, much, much better and longer progression free survival than the than the full dose chemotherapies. There’s enough data now to support that. And even in other drugs like immunotherapy, Ravan, India is emerging as a place now where low doses are the new thing because one of the leading hospitals in the country called Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital has published data with the one fifth of immunotherapy doses for cancer patients and they have published that it is similar response with much less side effects now. And it is a common place now in India.

Robin Daly
It’s very good to hear. I mean, of course, you know, the side effects of conventional care are legendary. They’re so bad. And so reducing the dose has to be a good thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, amazing. And Robin, one

Arpan Talwar
that we are just trying to now bring on the forefront without of healing cancer. Of course, it is integrative care, it is natural integrative 360 degree with conventional wherever it is needed, but our new motto is affordability now, that all this has to be affordable to the patients. So within India and now outside India as well, we would soon be launching affordable integrative cancer care. And we would really be extensively affordable. So our treatments would be if a patient needs a surgery, surgeries would be maximum to a cost of $2,000 maximum, not more than that. Chemotherapies, which are thousands of dollars, it would be just a couple of hundred dollars, not more than that. IV vitamins see another treatment, which are so expensive, which would be as cheap as $50, $60 at our clinic. So affordability is the new thing that we are launching in India next week, that integrative cancer care is not expensive because people think that that’s expensive. So it will not be expensive at all compared to how people have started tagging integrative as actually as expensive. So we want to remove the tag of expensive from integrative and make it make it affordable for everyone now.

Robin Daly
Well, look, that’s a laudable aim, but how are you achieving that?

Arpan Talwar
So we’re sitting in Robin in a country where, which is the drug manufacturing base. So, so the drug costs, I’ll give you an example. Um, I’ll give you an example of convention, but that’s quickly coming to my mind right now. Imagine a drug in lung cancer, which is, which is an EGFR inhibitor. Um, in us, I remember I checked with a medical oncologist on the, on the monthly cost of world or to me on a minimal basis, it’s around $3,500 per month. In India, you can actually purchase it for $200 a month with one of the best pharma companies of the country, one of the best you, so you can’t, so quality would be absolutely amazing because that company is a $2 billion company which manufactures it. So just because of the scale of the country, scale of the countries, there’s so much of drug manufacturing that even at, at low margins, companies, companies can make good overall margins because the volumes are the name of the game here. So, so one, the drug cost is lower. Second, what we have, what we have also done see overall operational costs in a country like India is not very expensive. Um, imagine a nurse that you could, I don’t know how much would you hire that in UK. A nurse might have a, have a salary of let’s say 6,000, 8,000 pounds a month. I don’t know. I’m just making a wild guess in India. You can actually get a very experienced nurse as a cost of a thousand pounds a month. So overall cost structures are not, not, not very high. Why do we charge so high? Just cut down on your margins, don’t charge, you know, treat many patients that even in volumes, you will make margin, whatever you need to make rather than making margins on a single patient.

Robin Daly
Very interesting. Well, you know, for some time now, people in Europe have been capitalising on differences in costs in different countries and have been travelling for various procedures. But increasingly, that’s been the kind of benefit, the financial benefit of that has been dwindling. There’s still reasons to travel elsewhere in order to get things that are not available in this country. But actually, you know, to go to Mexico is not cheap these days, really not. Whereas people would do it readily, you know, 20 years ago. So it’s very interesting that you’re actually intentionally going in that direction, because I think, unfortunately, it’s an opportunity for people to make more money than they normally would by offering it to Europeans who are used to paying more. And so the temptation is very great to actually put the prices up. So I’m very happy that you’re seeing otherwise because certainly in this country, even though we don’t have proper integrative medicine, if you want to go down an integrative medicine route, it costs you a fortune. You know, people are in a terrible position because, you know, many of them have lost their job because of their illness and they’re selling their house in order to pay for treatment. You know, it’s dire. And so, you know, to have someone actually focusing on making it affordable is fantastic. And it’s something I’d like to talk about a lot more because actually, you know, I’m thinking about it in respect to affordable integration for us in this country. Well, what are the approaches actually? Because, you know, there’s a sort of major cost difference between many approaches, whereas the difference in benefits is not necessarily so great. You know, some cheap approaches are actually remarkably effective. So we wanted to start highlighting the routes that people can go down if they haven’t got much money. So very interesting subject.

Arpan Talwar
No, absolutely. One thing I promise you, Robin, that any patient that comes to us, even if they do not have money, would still get the treatment. That’s the approach that that we would have, would still get the treatment. We haven’t we haven’t sent any patient back just because they don’t if we had to treat. So because and we all we run a charity as well in India. So if, for example, anyways, our costs would be at a cost, which would be one 10th of the cost in the European countries, I can assure you and the same quality of treatment, same type and same quality of treatment as a patient cannot even do that. We will fund that through our charity to the max we could. So so so so we will not send a patient back because they don’t have money. For example, I’ll tell you what we have done in the past and we want to do that more. I know there’s a lot of time that I’ve taken, but I’ll just share one more instance with you. So what we have also done is that imagine and volumes will give an answer to that. Imagine it’s a conventional treatment. Integrative we can we can reduce the cost to a level that people can’t even think of. But let’s say conventional where we need large setups, we need, let’s say we don’t have, we need to do a commando surgery where things are really gone bad and we need to immediately save the patient. And we do not have that kind of let’s say operation theater where we could do that. What we do is that we put five patients all in one day for the surgery and take an operation theater on rent of that particular hospital. And that hospital wasn’t actually using the operation theater that day. So for the for the for the hospital, it was it was zero revenue. I said, we’ll still give you let’s say, let’s say $500 or $800 for that day for the for the operation theater you anyways not using it. So it’s kind of uberization of the of the infrastructure. So that’s what we are doing often now, often now if we have 10 patients who can’t pay money, we’d all put them all in one day, one hospital, everyone will come there and we treat them.

Robin Daly
Brilliant. All right. Well, I love the direction you’re taking there in integrative medicine. It’s horrible to be telling somebody the benefits of integrative medicine when it’s spiraling out of their reach with cost, you know, it’s so brilliant. You know, lastly, I just to mention, I recently interviewed Mark Sean Taylor who runs patient-led oncology trials. In fact, it was he who kindly introduced me to your work. I understand you have collaborated with him. You are collaborating with him. Can you tell me exactly how?

Arpan Talwar
So Mark is working on a great initiative where he intends to collect a lot of data on what therapies are working on what cancer types, on what types of patients, what stages of patients, how their bloodworks are going up and down on a particular therapy, let’s say specific cancer patients, let’s say pancreatic cancer patients, how have they been performing on chemotherapy without IV vitamin C with IV vitamin C. So the way we are collaborating with Mark is that we would be sharing, obviously we can’t share the direct patient names and other details, but without the patient identity, a lot of results from different therapies that we are seeing will be pushed into the database that Mark is creating so that eventually he would have his database, his database would have a lot of inputs coming up from my clinic, from let’s say a clinic in Thailand, a clinic in Mexico, a clinic in Germany, on various different medicines, on various different types of cancers. Once let’s say a year or two year of data is there, that’s the brainchild. That system can give you guidance towards what types of cancers you should use, what types of drugs, what specific scenarios. So our idea with Mark is that to our set of patients, the end results of the treatments hiding half the patient identities will be pushed into his system which would then evaluate, use AI, machine learning to make a lot of insights from that particular data.

Robin Daly
available to people. Fantastic. All right. Really needed. I mean that’s what’s been missing actually in integrative oncology forever basically is pulling together of all the results so we can learn much faster. Fantastic. All right. Well look we’re out of time. Very interesting talk Avan. Thank you very much indeed and it’s been a real pleasure to meet you and to hear about the incredible work you’ve done. I love so much for what you’ve done. You’ve obviously brought a great asset to India and beyond and particularly this work to make it accessible to people is brilliant.

Arpan Talwar
Thank you so much, Robin. It was a pleasure at my end as well. And I’m really happy to see the great work that you are doing in UK, helping out patients, bringing the community together, and absolutely would love to meet you someday. I hope so. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Robin Daly
It’s so great to hear about the initiatives that are emerging now through the dedication of patients and their families such as Arpan and others who Arpan mentioned in the interview such as Mark Sean Taylor, Daniel Stanciu, Jay McLelland and many more. These people bring a desperately needed breath of fresh air into the world of cancer research and treatment as well as the sense of urgency that’s all but totally absent within mainstream research and cancer care. Lovely to have you join me today, please do make a note to listen again next week when I’ll be back with another Yes To Life show.