Driving Progress Through Collaboration at SABCS

Each year, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) represents the premier global meeting for research and treatment collaboration for a cancer that is the most frequently diagnosed type among women in close to 90% of the world’s countries. The experts who spoke to The American Journal of Managed Care^® during this year’s meeting emphasize its tremendous benefit, highlighting how it serves as a critical forum for researchers, clinicians, patients, and industry partners to share cutting-edge findings and provide mutual feedback. As well, they note how it has become a showcase for the increasingly complex treatment landscape, making shared decision-making with patients essential.

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This transcript was lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Justin Drake, PhD: It's an amazing meeting. It's the premier meeting in the world for breast cancer research. We love the meeting because it gives us opportunities to meet with world-renowned researchers and clinicians in the field, to not only talk about what we're doing, the exciting work that we're doing, get feedback potentially about the test, and to make clinicians aware of the test. I think there are a lot of opportunities for us to go out and discuss with these researchers and clinicians about what we're doing, as well as learn from them about the new findings that they have related to breast cancer research and therapy. I think it's definitely a mutually beneficial relationship at this meeting. I can't think of any other meeting to go to that would be more important than this one to really let the world know what we’re developing at Astrin.

Steven Manobianco, MD: I think my biggest takeaway so far is just how vast the treatment landscape has become. I think the days of a single set algorithm and a clear treatment path are over, and it's up to us as clinicians to look through the wealth of data that we're being presented to understand what makes sense for our patients. Unfortunately, sequencing data for a lot of our treatments simply don't exist yet. So, I think, more than ever, that shared decision-making with our patients and the emerging data will be critical to making the right treatment for the right patient.

Xiaotong Li, PhD, MS: This conference is very big and has different groups of people, for example, researchers and then patients, clinicians, other people all joining together. I think it's a very good opportunity to have us share our experience and the research findings, and then learn from each other. Because, for example, even now I haven't gone to the conference. I have received the questions from you, and I'm surprised I also had another interview, I reviewed all the questions. It's good for us to know how other people feel about our research, what their questions may be. That will be very helpful for us, to consider the next steps. I think it’s very important. Also, we focus on integrative medicine. We're not oncologists and basic scientists, so it's good to learn from other people about their knowledge.

Debra Patt, MD, PhD, MBA, MPH: I think my biggest takeaway from SABCS is that it's a tremendous forum for collaboration, and it's only through partnership between translational scientists, clinicians, patients, and industry partners that we make progress together. The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium has always been a great facilitator of those collaborations and that progress together. We'll go further together, and San Antonio has been a great champion of those efforts and really helps in that regard.

Eric H. Yang, MD: Well, I'm a cardiologist, so walking into this meeting is kind of like a freshman in college walking into an advanced physics class that I'm clearly not prepared or qualified to kind of be around. But I think, just all the amazing science and all the new medical technologies in terms of pharmaceutical treatments have made survivorship so much better. I know my colleagues are doing their best to also do that at the expense of reducing toxicities. This all points to a longer, better-living population, where we have to focus now on really another major cause of morbidity and mortality in this country, which still remains a top cause of death in men and women, which is heart disease, and breast cancer, just like heart disease, is becoming more and more chronic in nature, and we need to be cognizant and figure out the right population to keep an eye on long term to make sure that they don't suffer premature heart disease and other problems down the line.