Annette Bar-Cohen: So along with some of the education, training, and working in the research
room and again working in research means we work with researchers who work on clinical
trials.
We sit on important panels and committees all over the country on all levels, federal
state, and local and in our public policy work, we have been involved in lobbying a
congress because we know that we need adequate funding for the right kind of research and
we have to make sure that that funding is then used properly and so that’s the kind
of continuous involvement, monitoring, and training that we do in terms of public policy,
so I can give you an example, we began with understanding that we needed to have much
more innovative, ground breaking, and cutting edge research structure in this country and
we helped to develop the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program in the early
90s and that program continues to this day and has really faster and developed new creative
investigator programs, new mechanisms of research, and has resulted in some very interesting
and important breakthrough developments and we have developed that program in a such way
that trained and educated advocates trained through our programs are sitting on all those
committees that make those decision and are helping to review scientific proposals to
make sure that the right kinds of questions are being asked.
In addition, in terms of our Breast Cancer Deadline 2020, we have a piece of legislation
called the Accelerating the End Of Breast Cancer Act which is now going through congress
and garnering much support and it’s a way of getting us to leverage and gather all the
results of these billions of dollars that have been really invested in the breast cancer
enterprise over the last 20 years and trying to meet the benefits you know bring them together,
trying to figure out what the best possible pathways are for the most successful research
and we have really focused on two areas of research that we feel will have the greatest
impact in knowing how to end breast cancer and they are prevention, preventing the disease
from happening in the very first place, and preventing the women from dying of the disease
by stopping metastasis which is the cause of over 90% of deaths from breast cancer,
so that act would then really pull together in a high level commission all of the most
important work that is going on the country around these two areas of focus and make this
a streamlined, efficient, and powerful way of realizing our mission.
Visit our website www.breastcancerdeadline2020.org for more information about Breast Cancer Deadline
2020 of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.
Dr. Michael Alvarado: Did you know that not every breast cancer patient needs chemotherapy.
In fact today, there is a way to identify whether or not you would benefit from that
chemotherapy based on the biology of your tumor.
To learn more about the Oncotype DX assay and how to discuss the results with your physician,
just press this button.