New Delhi, Sept. 20 -- In March 2024, Nature carried a striking headline: 'Cutting-edge CAR-T cancer therapy is now made in India-at one tenth the cost'.

Just a month later, the President of India Droupadi Murmu formally launched the therapy, hailing it as the country's first homegrown gene therapy for cancer. Developed by a team of Indian scientists and cleared by regulators in late 2023, the therapy marked a watershed moment in Indian biomedical innovation.

At the centre of this revolution was an unassuming but determined thirty-five-year-old scientist: Alka Dwivedi.

Dwivedi and her team had achieved what many thought impossible-they had indigenously redesigned the most cutting-edge, patented cancer therapy of the West, capable of cu...