Road to a Cure - What it Means to Us
One of the first questions a newly diagnosed cancer patient usually asks is “Will I die from this disease?”. The very first question of a newly diagnosed metastatic patient is inevitably, “How long do I have?”. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women (only lung cancer kills more women each year). It is estimated that over 44,000 will die from breast cancer this year. Simply put, 116 of our MBC brothers and sisters will die today and tomorrow and the day after. These numbers are grim and they have not changed dramatically in the last 20 years. They are a testament to the cleverness of the disease and its ever-growing list of known variations and mutations.
And yet there are important exceptions, instances where long-term disease-free survival occurs. We all know some of these people, we call them unicorns. Every busy cancer clinic has patients who have had metastatic breast cancer for 20 to 25 years.
Cure isn’t a word thrown around lightly by oncologists, but now the top scientists in the cancer field are willing to bandy it about aloud, publicly, and often.
In 2016, a prominent oncologist and Stanford University professor named George Sledge, M.D. published a paper in the Journal of Oncology Practice called “Curing Metastatic Breast Cancer.” In this article, Dr. Sledge suggested that the existing paradigm around metastatic breast cancer (that it is incurable) should be updated in the face of new science developed in the past decade or so. Pointing to the fact that 1-2% of metastatic breast cancer patients are cured of their disease or survive for many years, he wrote, “If some patients are cured, might not we cure more?”
He is not alone in this way of thinking. In his keynote address at the 2020 Dana Farber Cancer InstituteEMBRACE Program conference, Dr. Eric Winer opined:
“Our treatments for HER2+ breast cancer have become so much better that the question that's arising - are some patients curable? In particular patients who are de novo. May those patients have the ability to be cured of their cancer? And so with all of these drugs that seem to be non-cross resistant or non-overlapping, can we develop curative approaches? If we do, what would we still need to do?”
Our MBC Life’s crack team of investigators is taking these and many other questions on the virtual road in the series that we call “Road to a Cure.” Over the next two months we will explore these and other topics with the leading clinicians and researchers in the field of breast cancer.
In this episode, we sit down with some Our MBC Life co-hosts and friends of the podcast who are living with MBC to discuss what it means to live with an incurable disease and consider a possibility of a cure. What is a cure? What is a chronic disease? In the next hour we will tackle these and many other questions.
Mentioned in this Episode
Sledge Jr. (2016) Curing Metastatic Breast Cancer
Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Statistics
Resources discussing how hope can be tricky:
Brene Brown podcast: Unlocking Us: Session 3 on the Gifts of Imperfection
Kelly Grosklags:
When Cancer Happens, Does it Take Courage to Hope? (print article from Coping Magazine)
The Courage to Hope (podcast)
Kate Bowler:
