Mumbai: It began with unexplained headaches and shooting pains in the neck, often lasting minutes but sometimes much longer. Within weeks, she experienced dizziness, disorientation and multiple convulsions, forcing the family to rush her to the local hospital. Within six months, even walking became impossible. By then, an extremely frail Sita Devi (name changed), 80, had left everything to fate. Her aggressive stage-4 lung cancer was fast metastasizing to her brain, making even visits to Dr Surendra Beniwal at the Acharya Tulsi Regional Cancer Institute and Research Centre in Bikaner extremely difficult. Her condition kept worsening: she doubled down with sharp pains and elevated heartbeat with every breath.

Under the usual protocol, she would have had a biopsy test followed by radiation until palliative care remained the only way out. But now she had one other option: a new genomic test called next-generation sequencing (NGS), which rapidly sorted through her DNA samples and picked out the precise genetic mutation that was most likely making her sick.

NGS, the newest frontier in medical diagnostics, is rapidly transforming patient care. It decodes genomic data and helps doctors translate that into personalised healthcare within a few days. It is a lifesaver especially for cancer patients but also for people with rare genetic disorders and reproductive and inherited diseases. This is one of the biggest leaps in a lab since the 1880s when the German bacteriologist Julius Petri came up with a way to isolate and analyse germ cultures in a gelatinous bed of algae set between two nesting discs of glass.

Source: ET Healthworld - June 21,2026