Dr. Anita Borges

Anita Borges spent more than twenty-five years at Tata Memorial Hospital, where she was Professor and Head of Surgical Pathology, and was known across the discipline as the “Queen of Histopathology” — a title that recognised how far her judgement had shaped cancer diagnosis in India.

She took her MBBS and MD in pathology at Topiwala National Medical College and B. Y. L. Nair Charitable Hospital in Mumbai, then became a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists in London, training and working at the Royal Marsden Hospital and at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York before returning.

Her expertise ran across oncopathology, but her particular interests were head and neck cancers, oral cancer and lymphoma — the first two being among the most common malignancies in India and among the least studied internationally, which made her work locally decisive in a way that a European or American career in the same subspecialty would not have been.

She later directed the Centre for Oncopathology in Mumbai and headed histopathology at S. L. Raheja Hospital. She served as Vice-President for Asia of the International Academy of Pathology and sat on the NABL board, the body that accredits Indian laboratories. She died on 18 September 2025.