Emerging Trends from SABCS16 in San Antonio
Like migrating birds, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) has many regular attendees who return each year to enjoy the location and opportunity to hear about latest advances in breast cancer. One leading academic clinician told me she’d been to every meeting for the past 20 years.
The Alamo
SABCS offers a unique mix of academic and community doctors, translational researchers, basic scientists and patient advocates. The only downside is that at times the meeting (to an outsider) does feel like a club or family with it’s own idiosyncrasies.
This year, a leading breast cancer oncologist characterized the meeting to me as a “negative one,” meaning several clinical trials were presented that reported essentially negative results.
Although these are an important part of science, and it was good to see them presented, like most of the media, even medical oncologists want to see the “positive” news and that’s understandable. There was no practice changing phase 3 data as in previous years. The trial we most anticipated being at SABCS was delayed due to slow events and that’s a good sign as it most likely means women are living longer…
As readers of the blog will know, we’ve yet to find a medical/scientific meeting that did not offer up pearls, and #SABCS16 was no different in this regard.
Whether you have to spend time in the poster halls or go to obscure sessions, they are there to be found somewhere.
I came away from #SABCS16 with fresh insights into new targets, biomarkers, and also how the world of cancer immunotherapy will interface with genomics. It is these advances in basic and translational science that drive future clinical research.
Experts I spoke to at San Antonio were generous with their time and insights and we’ll be rolling out a series of thought leader interviews in Q1, 2017.
In this post, I wanted to set the scene with what I thought were 3 trends emerging from SABCS16. This is of course, an entirely subjective choice and if you went to the meeting, and/or are an expert in the area, your list would most likely be different.
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