Letter from the President
Kelly Shanahan, M.D.
Happy Holidays!
This time of year is always frantic, with the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), the largest breast cancer conference in the world, close on the heels of Thanksgiving, and our board of directors meeting to review the recommendations of our Scientific Advisory Board on which grants to fund. What grants we can fund is 100% dependent on how much money has been raised this year, which is dependent on you, our supporters.
In addition to our executive director, Crystal Moore, and myself, other board members attending SABCS were Janice Cowden, Amy Beumer, Nathaniel Robinson, and Sharon Anderson. We met formally with 11 potential sponsors and informally with several more, so over the next several weeks Crystal and I will be following up to secure funding for programs such as the Stage IV Stampede and Summit; R.I.S.E. (Reach. Inform. Support. Empower), our reinvention of the old Sea to Sea for MBC program, where we hope to have board members and volunteers across the country reach under resourced populations, as well as connecting with funded researchers to learn about what they’ve accomplished with our grant funding (look for a survey in early January if you’d like to participate in R.I.S.E.); and Peer-to-Peer support groups. I was able to attend several interesting sessions live, but my brain is no longer able to listen and live-tweet, so my plan is to watch some of the recordings and share information over the next few weeks. Janice and Amy were on panels, and brilliantly represented the voice of us, the experts in living with cancer. I had a lovely dinner with my amazing oncologist and oncologists from Morocco, and they are interested in bringing our peer-to-peer training to their fledgling advocacy and support groups. SABCS is a crazy week, with an easy 10k steps/day but not 10k winks at night, and it’s one of my favorite weeks of the year – hopefully I’ll catch up on sleep before my daughter comes home in a few days!
As for our grants, this year we received almost 200 letters of intent, and invited 65 to submit full applications, of which 62 did submit: 10 quality of life; 36 translational; and 16 early career; plus 1 advisor’s award to a member of our scientific advisory board. We will be announcing the recipients of these awards the first week in January, so stay tuned! We spoke to quite a few researchers at SABCS and I think we’ll have even more LOIs and applications next year, so keep up the fundraising efforts!
The great Dr. Dennis Slamon, the man behind trastuzumab (Herceptin), in his plenary session said that we advocates are not just fundraisers and cheerleaders for research, we are colleagues whose inclusion in the design of clinical trials makes the trials better and innovation faster.
From our METAvivor family to yours, may this holiday season be full of love and light.
-Kelly