Immunotherapy Cost in India

What is immunotherapy?

Immunotherapy is a cancer treatment that helps the body's immune system fight cancer cells. Unlike traditional therapies like chemotherapy, which attack cancer cells directly, immunotherapy boosts the immune system to identify and destroy cancer cells.

What is the immunotherapy cost in India?

Immunotherapy is an effective cancer treatment available at leading hospitals in India, with costs starting around INR 1 lakh per cycle. Costs depend on factors like cancer stage, type of medicines, patient’s age, and treatment plan, with 3-4 cycles typically recommended.

What are the factors affecting the Immunotherapy cost in India?

There are various factors affecting the immunotherapy cost in India:

• Experience of Doctors
• Type of Hospitals
• Availability of Doctors
• Insurance availability
• Location

How is immunotherapy given to a cancer patient?

There are several ways to give immunotherapy to a patient. A doctor can choose any of these organs as per the patient’s health condition:-

• Intravenous (IV) –The immunotherapy goes directly into a vein of a patient.
• Oral -The immunotherapy goes in the form of pills or capsules that the patient can swallow.
• Topical – The immunotherapy comes in a cream rubbed onto a patient’s skin. This type of immunotherapy is popular for treating early skin cancer.
• Intravesical – in this, the immunotherapy goes directly into the bladder of a patient.

What are the different types of immunotherapy?

In the past few years, immunotherapy treatment has become a vital part of cancer treatment and various other disease treatments. There are several types of immunotherapy, and every therapy works differently. Some immunotherapy aims to boost your immune system, while others seek to teach it to attack particular kinds of cells found in tumors. Two or more immunotherapy procedures can be combined to treat or diagnose cancer. Here are a few types of immunotherapy:-

• Immune stimulants – This type of immunotherapy treatment stimulates the immune system to attack cancer cells and tumors. Immune stimulant immunotherapy treats some types of skin cancer and non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.
• Adoptive cell transfer – Adoptive cell transfer immunotherapy is used to boost T-cells’ ability to fight cancer patients. In this type of immunotherapy, healthy active cells are taken from a tumor, changed/mutated in the lab to fight against cancer, and put back inside the body. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is a type of adoptive cell transfer showing promising results for some types of cancer like leukemia and lymphoma.
• Oncolytic viruses: Oncolytic viruses weaken the immune response against infected cells. Oncolytic therapy, also called T-VEC, is used to fight against these viruses by injecting them into the melanoma to kill these viruses and stimulate the immune system. Usually, Oncolytic virus therapy is used to treat brain cancer.