New Delhi | November 26,2025 | SKY LINK TIMES
Revolution in Cancer Care:
In a major breakthrough for precision oncology, researchers at the S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, in collaboration with Ashoka University, have developed an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) framework that can radically change how cancer is understood and treated. The announcement was made on Wednesday by the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The AI system, named OncoMark, offers a pioneering approach by analysing the molecular personality of cancer, rather than assessing tumours merely by their size or spread. The development is expected to pave the way for highly personalised cancer therapies that could significantly improve patient survival and treatment response.
Table of Contents
A New Lens to Understand Cancer
For decades, cancer diagnosis and prognosis have relied primarily on staging systems such as TNM, which evaluate tumour size, lymph node involvement, and metastasis. However, these metrics often fail to explain why two patients with the same clinical stage can have drastically different outcomes.
According to the Ministry, “Cancer is not just a disease of growing tumours — it is powered by a set of hidden biological programmes called the hallmarks of cancer.” These hallmarks determine how cancer cells evade immunity, metastasise, or resist treatment.
OncoMark decodes these molecular hallmarks and predicts tumour behaviour with high precision.
How OncoMark Works
The AI framework was trained using 3.1 million single-cell datasets spanning 14 major cancer types. Researchers created synthetic “pseudo-biopsies” representing hallmark-based tumour states, enabling the AI to learn complex biological relationships.
The tool demonstrated exceptional performance:
Over 99% accuracy in internal validation
Above 96% accuracy across five independent patient cohorts
Tested on 20,000 real-world clinical samples
Data sourced from eight major global datasets
For the first time, researchers could visualise how hallmark activity escalates as cancer advances — a crucial step toward early detection of aggressive tumours.
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Real-World Impact on Treatment
Published in Nature’s Communications Biology, the research shows that OncoMark can:
Reveal which hallmarks are active in a patient’s tumour
Help clinicians select drugs targeting specific tumour mechanisms
Identify high-risk cancers hidden behind seemingly mild staging results
Enable timely and personalised intervention strategies
The Ministry stated that the framework has the potential to become a powerful decision-support tool for oncologists and could contribute significantly to next-generation precision medicine.
Driving the Future of Healthcare
The research team, led by Dr. Shubhasis Haldar and Dr. Debayan Gupta, believes that OncoMark represents an important step toward affordable personalised cancer care in India, a country where cancer burden continues to rise rapidly.
S N Bose is an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), working towards advanced biomedical research.
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