San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

The biggest event of the year for breast cancer researchers and advocates is the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, which ended a week ago. The research that's presented there hasn't been published anywhere yet, and it's often many months before it makes it to mainstream news, if it ever does.

Two years ago, I pored over every abstract online, seeking hope for Sandy's cancer, which was so far responding well to treatment. I scribbled the names of promising drugs and information about studies and trials related to them. It was through an abstract that I first learned about the Army of Women (the Dr. Susan Love Foundation's project to find subjects for clinical trials related to breast cancer). And as I read about the San Antonio symposium, I saw several references to National Breast Cancer Coalition advocates interacting directly with some of the top researchers and medical personnel in the country; that's when I joined NBCC.

Two years later, I and most of the women I know are members of the Army of Women. (If you haven't signed up, do! You'll receive notice of trials, and if you qualify, you can help make a difference. They need those who've been diagnosed and treated for breast cancer, but also those who haven't.)

I'm an advocate with the National Breast Cancer Coalition now, and I know much more than I did two years ago. In large part, I know more due to NBCC training.

And I still find hope in the data released and discussed in San Antonio. Two years ago, I told Sandy she was the hot topic, as so much of the researchers were starting to focus on triple-negative breast cancer. That's even more true today, and they've learned a lot in two years, particularly related to the heterogeneity of triple-negative breast cancer. Some is aggressive; some isn't. It's defined by what it isn't (it isn't estrogen-receptor positive; it isn't progesterone-receptor positive; it isn't Her2 positive), which makes it difficult to provide targeted therapies. But the understanding of subsets is offering the opportunity for more effective treatment, a way to identify individual tumors by what they are, rather than by what they aren't.

Two years ago this weekend, on Whidbey Island, feeling
relatively optimistic on our 15th anniversary.

I don't read every abstract anymore. I'm not chasing down possible clinical trials for Sandy, and I'm no longer running into the other room, dripping statistics and drug names in an optimistic frenzy. (She finally said to me, "I don't need to know all the details. That's really your department. Just come in and say 'Hope! Hope! Hope!'")

You can find a good and encouraging description of the highlights of the triple-negative research presented at this year's symposium at http://curetoday.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/blog.showIndex/guest/2012/12/9/A-recap-of-triplenegative-breast-cancer-research-from-San-Antonio

A less encouraging, but more analytical summary of the symposium as a whole and of its notable research for all types of breast cancer is at http://blog.breastcancerdeadline2020.org/?p=472. The author of the post describes her frustration with what I think of as tweaking - playing around with doses and moving drugs from one group to another, often in search of a market rather than following some clear scientific theory. She's right when she says we need to pull scientists and the rest of the breast cancer research community into a common pursuit, which is exactly what the 2020 Breast Cancer Deadline is doing. So perhaps SABCS will be less frustrating and more exciting in future.

This year, the abstracts are available online only for those who attended the symposium, which is disappointing. But you can check out the program to see the names of papers presented at www.sabcs.org, and the abstracts may eventually be posted for the public. Abstracts from previous years are still available.