Dr. M. A. Raja — Director of Oncology Services in Chennai

Dr. M. A. Raja is Director of Oncology Services at MGM Healthcare in Chennai, with more than 42 years of experience. His profile records two specializations, medical oncology and hematology, and his qualifications are MBBS, MD and MRCP.

Four procedures are listed, and between them they cover the whole length of drug treatment for cancer: chemotherapy for cancer, targeted therapy for cancer, cancer immunotherapy and CAR-T cell therapy. The first is the oldest tool in the field and the last is among the newest, so a patient whose disease needs conventional cytotoxic drugs and a patient whose blood cancer has stopped responding to them both fall inside his stated range.

His training was taken in Chennai and in England. He read MBBS at Kilpauk Medical College in Chennai in 1977 and returned to the same college for his MD in 1981. In 1988 he took MRCP from the Royal College of Physicians in England, and in 1996 he added the European Certification of Medical Oncology. He is affiliated with MGM Healthcare and with MGM Cancer Institute in Chennai.

His memberships are unusually wide and fall into two halves. On the clinical side he belongs to the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the European Society of Medical Oncology, the Royal Society of Medicine in the UK, the Association of Physicians of India and the Indian Society of Medical and Pediatric Oncology. On the laboratory side he belongs to the American Association of Cancer Research and the European Association of Cancer Research. That combination keeps him in the rooms where treatment standards are agreed and in the rooms where the underlying science is first presented.