From the Director's Desk
Our Year in Review
At the close of the year, I found myself reflecting on the year’s challenges and successes. Individual days blur into a haze of meetings, schedules, decisions, and actions, and I relished the chance to sit back and summarize the year. I am pleased to share the progress we’ve made. The hard work put in by our staff and our researchers, council members, and community supporters is making an impact. We are still several years away from finding a way to eradicate the disease, but our efforts, and the ceaseless efforts of our researchers, are making progress towards greater and more profound breakthroughs.
The California Breast Cancer Research Program has always been an international example of the overall influence that a smaller research funding organization can make. This year, our program’s leadership role has been expanded through staff appointments to national committees that are just beginning to pursue the important topics that we’ve been focused on for years.
- The National Institutes of Health invited me to chair its committee on community-based participatory research.
- California State Assembly Speaker Fabian Núnez appointed me to the California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program Scientific Guidance Panel, which assists the Department of Health Services and California Environmental Protections Agency by providing scientific peer reviews and making recommendations regarding the design and implementation of the California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program.
- Catherine Thomsen, project lead for our Special Research Initiatives, was appointed to the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NACOSH) by US Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao.
We are delighted to welcome a new group of members to our advisory council. These women and men serve three years without compensation, and they wield their expertise to focus the California Breast Cancer Research Program to be dynamic, responsive, and innovative. The dedication and commitment shown by all of our advisory council members is inspirational.
Our researchers are making tremendous progress, and several have received much-deserved attention for their work. Perhaps you read or heard something about them:
- Dr. Albert Deisseroth and his team at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center are preparing a clinical trial to test an experimental vaccine that could induce a patient’s body to attack cancer cells, as it would for viruses
- Dr. Howard Chang and his graduate student, Adam Adler, at Stanford University School of Medicine have been working on a novel therapy for breast cancer tumors that exhibit wound-like characteristics, which tend to be highly aggressive
- Drs. Sean McAllister and Pierre Yvez Desprez and their colleagues at California Pacific Medical Center have identified a non-toxic compound in cannabis that could slow the spread of breast cancer
- Dr. Susan Love and Dr. Ellen Mahoney are furthering their development of a less invasive, intraductal therapy for early-stage DCIS breast cancer, which could help some women avoid extreme and unnecessary treatments
- A partnership between the San Joaquin Valley Health Consortium and the Central Valley Health Policy Institute at California State University, Fresno, is helping guide uninsured and under-insured women with breast cancer in Fresno through their treatment in order to better identify and resolve barriers to effective breast cancer care
- Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman and her team at University of California, San Francisco, published their study of racial disparities in breast cancer screening and detection
- Drs. Robert Oshima and Yuehai Ke at The Burnham Institute of Medical Research collaborated in a study of signaling pathways that lead to breast cancer events; their work resulted in greater understanding of proteins that may spur metastatic breast cancer
Our Special Research Initiatives (SRI) also made great progress. We completed our initial report, over 500 pages, that summarizes and reviews the existing research into the twin issues of the environmental influences of breast cancer and the disparities of the disease. Our strategy team used this document to define the gaps where the California Breast Cancer Research Program can best marshal its resources to find answers to those issues.
Two of our leading priorities are to widely disseminate information about our research results and to include Californians in the decisions we make about our program. This year, we held an unprecedented number of meetings with the public.
- In the spring, we held four in-person meetings and two teleconferences that outlined our SRI development strategy. Over 200 people attended our sessions in Ukiah, Fresno, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I’m grateful for the participation and enthusiasm that people brought to the events.
- Our report, “Identifying Gaps in Breast Cancer Research,” is available electronically on our website (www.cbcrp.org/sri/reports/identifyingGaps/), and we invite ongoing public comment.
- This year we initiated a Featured Researcher element on our website, which highlights researchers and their projects. The public is invited to email specific questions for our researchers, and the questions and answers are posted to our website.
- We continued to provide outreach Year in Review continued from page 2 and technical support for groups interested in our community research collaboration awards, and this year we held meetings in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as a teleconference for those who couldn’t get to our in-person meetings.
- And let’s not forget our symposium! In early September, we convened nearly 600 researchers, advocates, healthcare providers, and interested members of the public to review the progress that we’ve made towards eradicating breast cancer.
None of what we do would be possible without the ongoing support of people like you. You inspire our vision, our mission, and our dedication to looking for new answers and better ways to reach our goal.
Marion H. E. Kavanaugh-Lynch, M.D., M.P.H.,
Director of the CBCRP
