“CBCRP Hosts a New Course with a Comprehensive View of Breast Cancer”
Sue Rochman and Katherine McKenzie, Ph.D., CBCRP Biomedical Research Administrator
On March 26-27, 2003, the CBCRP joined The Susan Love MD Breast Cancer Research (SLMD) Foundation in hosting their first-ever Breast Cancer Course for Researchers: An Interdisciplinary Review of the State of the Science. The course gave the more than 100 researchers, including basic scientists, physicians, and epidemiologists, who attended the conference a unique opportunity to learn about and discuss breast cancer science from an array of research perspectives.
The goal of the course reflected the goals of the CBCRP — to generate new research ideas by bringing together disparate groups who can develop a new way to address the breast cancer issues. “This program was important to us because the goals of the Breast Cancer Course for Researchers are the same as those of our program: to eliminate breast cancer by leading innovation in research, communication, and collaboration,” said CBCRP Director Marion Kavanaugh-Lynch, M.D., M.P.H. “I feel confident that the researchers who attended this conference will use the information they gained to improve their own research and to advance what we know about breast cancer.”
The course developed from a think tank meeting at the SLMD Foundation. “It was becoming increasingly clear to me that many researchers weren't aware of how breast cancer science was approached in fields outside of their own,” says Susan Love, M.D., the foundation's president. “And if the surgeons don't know what the basic scientists are doing, or the epidemiologists don't know what the radiologists have learned, we're never going to solve the breast cancer puzzle. The idea was to bring people together so that they could learn from each other and better understand how their own work fits into the broader field of breast cancer research.”
Prominent breast cancer experts served as Breast Course Faculty and gave state-of-the-art overviews of the epidemiology, basic science, and clinical aspects of breast cancer — to provide the “whole picture” of this disease. The four sections included in the program were (1) Normal Biology of the Breast — What We Know and Don't Know, (2) The Epidemiology of Breast Cancer, (3) Hormones and the Breast, and (4) Clinical Breast Cancer: What We Know and Don't Know. The schedule was structured to encourage attendees to participate, both in a group forum and to interact with each other.
The exchange of information was lively, enlightening, and most importantly, provided the groundwork for new collaborations and fresh ways of approaching research questions in breast cancer.
Breast Cancer Course for Researchers Faculty:
The Normal Breast — What We Know and Don't Know
Mary Helen Barcellos Hoff, Ph.D., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Roy Jensen, M.D., Vanderbilt University
The Epidemiology of Breast Cancer
Steven Cummings, M.D., University of California, San Francisco
Sue Hankinson, Sc.D., Harvard Medical School
Hormones and the Breast
Steffi Oesterreich, Ph.D., Baylor College of Medicine
Richard Santen, M.D., University of Virginia
Douglas Yee, M.D., University of Minnesota
Clinical Breast Cancer: What We Know and Don't Know
Daniel Hayes, M.D., University of Michigan
Funmi Olopade, M.D., University of Chicago
