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Pakistan's federal public health institute in Islamabad. Since September 2025 the law gives it the duty to build a national register of cancer patients, and its research arm compiled the first pooled national cancer report.
The National Institutes of Health in Islamabad describe themselves as a public health institution, conceived as a National Health Center in the early 1960s, that started functioning in 1965. The National Institute of Health (Re-organization) (Amendment) Act, 2025 (Act XXIX of 2025), which received presidential assent on 5 September 2025 and was published in the Gazette of Pakistan on 13 September 2025, inserted sub-sections (2A) to (2C) into section 16 of the 2021 Act. They direct the centre to assure the registration of cancer patients in a central repository, including names and national identity card numbers, to call on any hospital or laboratory for cancer data, and to register confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries and demographic details, with personal particulars not disclosed without the patient's written consent.
Before the Act, its Health Research Institute pooled data from the Punjab Cancer Registry, the Karachi Cancer Registry, the PAEC cancer registry, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology registry and two hospital registries into the first national report, for 2015 to 2019, which analysed 269,707 cancer cases (J Coll Physicians Surg Pak 2023). The map position is the city centre; the institute's address is Park Road, Chak Shahzad.
Explains why Pakistan's cancer numbers are estimates: the registries that exist cover a minority of the country and do not share one method. The authors call for a national registry system, which the 2025 amendment to the National Institute of Health law now requires.
It is the nearest thing Pakistan has to a national cancer count, and its authors point out that most of the commonest cancers are largely preventable: oral cancer correlates with chewing habits, and liver, lung and cervical cancer with hepatitis B and C, smoking and high-risk human papillomavirus. It counts registered cases, not population incidence.
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