Walden Forum Addresses the Battle Against Breast Cancer

The following was submitted by a representative with the Walden Forum.

Join us for a discussion with Ronni Cohen-Boyar, executive director of the Massachusetts Affiliate of Susan G.Komen, and Dr. Eric Winer, director, Breast Oncology Center Thompson Senior Investigator in Breast Cancer Research as they address the Walden Forum at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 21. The Walden Forum will be held at the Wayland Middle School Auditorium.

Cohen-Boyar says “working with Komen is more than a job. It’s a lifestyle.” As Executive Director, Cohen-Boyar not only educates the public about screening and early detection of breast cancer, she’s a walking example of its effectiveness. She is a two-time breast cancer survivor who caught her cancer early (both times) because of regularly scheduled mammograms. The second time she opted for a double mastectomy. The affiliate’s goal is 100 percent screening, 100 percent access to care, 100 percent follow-up for all Massachusetts residents.

Cohen-Boyar notes that as you look around the color pink seems to permeate the visual field – clothes, ribbons, boxes, even buildings. What should you know about cause-related marketing? Is this just a marketing pull on your heart strings or does all that pink actually do some good?

Dr. Winer notes that there has been tremendous progress in breast cancer, but 40,000 women still succumb to the disease each year in the United States alone. And over 400,000 women die of breast cancer worldwide. There have been improvements in screening and, perhaps even more impressively in treatment. Science has marched forward, but we are now facing a crisis in funding as a result of the economic downturn over the past several years and major reductions in federal funding. At a time when we need to step on the accelerator, it is harder and harder to bring new treatments to the clinic. How are we going to get past these challenges and what lies ahead?

As we enter an era of increasingly personalized medicine, it will be more important than ever before to understand the molecular differences between different types of breast cancer. By harnessing this information, we can begin to conduct “smarter” clinical trials. In this way, we hope to develop better treatments that will more effectively target the tumor and avoid some of the side effects of standard treatments. By definition, these clinical trials will be more complex than those we have conducted in the past, and will also be more expensive.