Dr. Syed Ismail Nawab John — Clinical Lead and Senior Consultant in Chennai

Dr. Syed Ismail Nawab John is Clinical Lead and Senior Consultant at MGM Healthcare in Chennai, with more than 16 years of experience. He is listed in both medical oncology and hematology, and his qualifications are MBBS, MD, DM and DNB.

His procedure list is broad at both ends. Chemotherapy for cancer, cancer immunotherapy and targeted therapy for cancer are joined by hormone therapy given separately for breast, prostate and gynecologic cancers, and by CAR-T cell therapy. That last entry belongs to the hematology half of his practice and is the point where treatment stops being a drug given to the patient and becomes the patient's own cells re-engineered.

His training was taken in Tirunelveli and Chennai and is unusually layered. He read MBBS at Tirunelveli Medical College in 2002, then MD in radiotherapy at Madras Medical College in Chennai in 2006. He returned to the same college for DM in medical oncology in 2013, finishing as gold medallist, and again for DNB in medical oncology in 2016. Two separate postgraduate qualifications in the same subject, on top of a radiotherapy degree, is a long apprenticeship by any measure.

He is affiliated with MGM Healthcare and is a member of the Indian Society of Oncology, the Indian Society of Gastroenterology and the Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy of India. The two gastroenterology bodies sit oddly beside an oncology practice only until you consider how many of the cancers treated with systemic drugs in India begin in the digestive tract.