Advocates’ Thoughts on SABCS 2024

This podcast episode is made possible by The Menarini Group.

Welcome to The Breastcancer.org Podcast. The podcast that brings you the latest information on breast cancer research, treatments, side effects, and survivorship issues through expert interviews, as well as personal stories from people affected by breast cancer. 

Antoinette Greer: Hi. I'm Antoinette Greer. I'm from My Sister My Friend Breast Cancer Support. We’re located in Long Beach, California, and we service all of LA County. 

Jamie DePolo: Excellent. And Antoinette, this is your first San Antonio Breast Cancer Conference. So, what are your impressions so far?

Antoinette Greer: So far…I just got in today. So far, I'm excited. I've in-person met quite a few people that I met originally online, but I've been able to connect a face with a person and that’s been exciting for me. 

Jamie DePolo: Was there any research or anything that you saw that you were particularly excited about or that you’ve heard about that’s going to be presented that you're excited about?

Antoinette Greer: I got in late this evening on that HER2, HER2-low, that research in metastatic breast cancer is something that I'm very interested in because quite often we have to navigate patients who want to know about trials and drugs that are available to them when their…their chemotherapy is not working.

Jamie DePolo: Sure.

Antoinette Greer: So, we like to stay abreast so that we can give people, you know, information that is actually vetted in terms of what we know about the trial so that we can help them, you know, make informed decisions. 

Jamie DePolo: Absolutely.

Antoinette Greer: Because we know that patients, clients, survivors, women in treatment, are often reluctant to join clinical trials. 

Jamie DePolo: Yes.

Antoinette Greer: Especially people of color, like myself. So, the more we know, the better we can help be represented in trials and make sure people know that they can jump in and out anytime that they like, but they have to be vetted and qualified for the trial in the first place. They’re not guinea pigs, so…

Jamie DePolo: Right.

Antoinette Greer: …this is powerful information to know firsthand. 

Jamie DePolo: Oh, yeah. And the thing is, if we don’t have a diverse group in the trial, we don’t know that the medicine works the same in all different kinds of people. 

Antoinette Greer: Yeah. And we already know that people are biologically different and that’s a large part of why it may not work as well in people of color because they only represented close to 4% in clinical trials. So, it’s…it’s vital that we have all the information, you know, that’s out there and keep current with it, so that people are not so terrified to consider those things. 

Jamie DePolo: Absolutely. Thank you very much. 

Antoinette Greer: Thank you for having me. 

Gitte Joergensen: Hi. My name is Gitte Joergensen. I am currently at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. I'm here with the Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance and I'm also here as an ambassador for Make Cancer Less Shitty. 

Jamie DePolo: I can guess what that’s about.

Gitte Joergensen: It’s about side effects and how to minimize some of these things that we’re dealing with on a daily basis…

Jamie DePolo: Sure.  

Gitte Joergensen:…that for me takes up an enormous amount of my time. So, I'm excited to be here again. This is kind of, for breast cancer, the event of the year. It’s my second year in-person and before that I did virtually. And last year I decided this I must do every year if I can, because it’s where it happens. It’s where everything happens, and you get to meet people that you don’t see at any other time.

And for lobular breast cancer we have a first year where we have poster prizes. A pretty nice prize. I can’t remember exactly, but it’s good. And we have, I believe, over 50 lobular posters. So, it’s actually doubled or more from last year.

And lastly, I am super excited to go and hang out with the therapy animals tomorrow because that’s my favorite thing. 

Jamie DePolo: Excellent.

Gette Joergensen: And I'm going to make them ambassadors, too. 

Jamie DePolo: Thank you so much. 

Joan Mancuso: My name is Joan Mancuso. I've been living with metastatic breast cancer since 2007, and I always love coming to the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. I've been coming here for several years, and you always learn something new and there’s always excellent presentations. I'm with Theresa’s Research Foundation. I'm on their board for helping to develop the annual Metastatic Breast Cancer Research Conference. And so, I feel that being here always picks up a lot of information about doing the agenda for that conference. 

This year, oddly enough, the Metastatic Breast Cancer Alliance had an excellent presentation on dos and don’ts with metastatic breast cancer. And there were a lot of clinicians in the audience, and they were getting a lot of tips from the panelists about how the best way is to approach people living with metastatic breast cancer.

Another excellent session I went to was on ctDNA. We’re all waiting for the ball to drop. I don’t know if you would call it that, but pretty much it’s always not ready for prime time. Even though it seems to be getting closer to prime time, it seems to be getting more complicated. So, I was excited about that because we’d love to be able to have ctDNA in place of tissue biopsies. 

You know, especially that it could potentially give more information from a liquid biopsy than you could even get from tissue biopsy considering that breast cancer is so heterogeneous.

You know, so, there’s always…so that was also an excellent presentation where there was a lot of…I picked up a lot of information from there. So, I'm looking forward to the rest of the conference and some obviously excellent presentations. 

Barbara Bigelow: I am Barbara Bigelow and I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. I'm here at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium with the MBC Alliance and I'm also on the board of directors at METAvivor.

And I'm triple-negative so I have a really serious type of metastatic breast cancer, and I've also had an early-stage primary lung cancer and melanoma. And I'm really excited to be here because this is where it happens. This is the rooms where it happens and it’s exciting to meet all these researchers and doctors that are working on our behalf, and they are obviously working very, very hard in moving the research along faster and faster. 

And I guess the thing I'm most excited about is the idea of liquid biopsies and circulating tumor DNA. I went to a long discussion about that yesterday and I found it fascinating. We’re at the beginning of learning more about that, but that’s something I'm excited about.

And also, to see all my friends. The social aspects of this and the patient advocate lounge, which is amazing, and you get to see everybody and talk and catch up. So, that’s really what I'm here for. 

Christine Hodgdon: I just love the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. It’s one of my favorite conferences. My name is Christine Hodgdon and I'm the co-founder of GRASP, an organization that brings patients and researchers together for meaningful collaborations. So, I have so many things that I'm excited about, so I'm going to try really hard to summarize. 

I think for me the most interesting study that came out in the late breaking abstracts was the PATINA study. I'm selfishly interested because this is me. I am this population.

So, this study was looking at patients with triple-positive, metastatic breast cancer, meaning they had the HER2-positive amplification for their cancer, as well as expressing ER-positive and/or PR-positive. So, these patients had no prior treatment in the advanced setting. So, that meant they underwent standard of care, which was Herceptin, Perjeta, Taxol.  And then…which is exactly what I did.

But then, what they ended up doing was because of this ER-positive, you know, because of this subtype, and we see this…HER2 patients ask this all the time, why am I not also receiving a CDK inhibitor? We see that this works for ER-positive patients. We also have the ER-positive subtype, so why not? 

So, we’ve been actually asking that question for a long time and this study also asked that question. So, they ended up adding the CDK inhibitor, plus endocrine therapy, after what they call induction. So, the induction was the Herceptin, Perjeta, Taxol. And they found a really remarkable difference in median progression-free survival. I think…I'm not exactly sure if I'm exactly right on these numbers, but I think it was 44 months versus 29 months. So, that was really incredible and I'm really excited to see what else happens with this cohort of patients. We’re not that common, but triple-positive is something that is unique from the HER2-positive patients and the ER-positive patients. And I'm just really happy that they’re looking at that.

The other thing that I was excited about, to tell you, is I did a really wonderful panel yesterday and I can’t remember the exact name, but it was something about organ site-specific metastasis. And we had a presenter discuss brain metastasis, another on liver metastasis, another on bone metastasis. And it was very heavy on the basic science. I think almost everybody on that panel had a PhD. And so it was a little intimidating for me to be the advocate on the panel, but what I decided to do was meet with each of the presenters individually to understand, really understand, like sort of the main highlights of each of those studies. And so, what I was able to do in my talk was summarize, in laymen terms, what each of those studies meant and what the impact was for patients.

And you know, it just dawned on me that maybe we should be doing this at every single panel. Like every panel should have an advocate discussant. And I know that’s a little intimidating for patients, but I think my organization GRASP can absolutely help with that and help with the training and help facilitate these conversations so that patients can feel confident. But I think it’s really important that we include patients meaningfully in the conversation. Not just sitting on the panel just to say there’s an advocate on the panel, but to include them meaningfully. So, that was just like a really interesting outcome. 

One other part of SABCS that’s truly my favorite part I think is the GRASP reception that we hold now annually. It’s just such an interesting event because it really does bring scientists and patients together. I think we had…we haven’t run the numbers yet, but something around 150 people and I think over half were clinicians or researchers.

So, that’s really cool because we often have these events that are very siloed. You know, you have an advocacy reception, or you have, you know, a clinician, you know, talk and it’s not, you know, intended to bring both parties together. But I think GRASP does this really well and it was just really exciting to see everybody in one room. So, yeah. So, it’s been a great, great conference. I'm going home today. I'm sad to leave. But it was really excellent. But I am looking forward to catching up on my sleep. 

Thank you for listening to The Breastcancer.org Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To share your thoughts about this or any episode, email us at podcast@breastcancer.org, or leave feedback on the podcast episode landing page on our website, and remember, you could find out a lot more information about breast cancer at Breastcancer.org, and you can connect with thousands of people affected by breast cancer by joining our online community.