New Zealander reads about Bengaluru in media, picks city for cancer treatment
The story was about a fellow Kiwi who had travelled all the way to Bengaluru for CAR T-cell therapy and gone into remission.
For Pipe, who had already endured 20 cycles of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, it felt like the only ray of hope left.
"In New Zealand, laws don't allow doctors to recommend treatments outside the country since care is covered under public health. I had a bone marrow transplant in 2023, but remission lasted only 14 months. By Feb 2025, the cancer was back. A new drug was tried but it failed, and by May, doctors told me I had reached the end of the road," Pipe recalled.
"That's when I read about CAR T-cell therapy, where my own T-cells would be modified and infused back into me to fight cancer.
The newspaper report spoke of a professor who underwent the same treatment in Bengaluru and had been in remission for a year. That convinced me," he explained.
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Soon after, Pipe reached out to Dr Prasad Narayanan, senior consultant and director of medical oncology, hemato-oncology and bone marrow transplant at Cytecare Hospitals, Yelahanka, to begin discussions.
After the initial chemo and final Car-T infusion in the city, Pipe said: "It was an anticlimax. Doctors asked me how I felt. I felt bored and only stared at the nine faces that were surrounding me," he laughed, thanking Bengaluru's medical specialists.
Robotic cardiac procedures
City hospitals across the board are seeing patients coming in from abroad for advanced treatments. In the past three years alone, 93 patients came to Sakra World Hospital from outside India for robotic cardiac surgeries. "While conventional open-heart surgery typically requires 8-10 days of hospital stay and 2-3 months for full recovery, patients at Sakra undergoing robotic cardiac procedures are often discharged within 3-4 days, with most returning to normal life in 2-3 weeks," said hospital representatives.
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