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I want you to imagine a world without breast cancer.
That is our goal.
>> When my mom was diagnosed,
it was like the floor fell out from under us.
It was completely unexpected.
She looked fine.
I had no idea that she was even going to the doctor to
have a lump looked at.
>> My name is Leslie Ries, I am a patient of Dr.
Fetting's at Johns Hopkins, and celebrating my tenth
anniversary of my diagnosis of breast cancer.
And I'm thinking back up on all of the things I've been through
over the past ten years, and my family's been through.
And thinking about where science has come in that time period.
And I'm both very excited by the science and
sad about our inability to be able to raise enough money for
really exciting research that we have planned at Johns Hopkins.
>> When Leslie and Tom asked how we should use the money that
they and others were going to donate,
prevention came immediately to mind.
While we've made progress,
there are still way too many women who die of this disease.
And for women who are diagnosed and treated, they face
uncertainty going forward, about how things are gonna play out.
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>> The fear associated in women who think they will
get breast cancer is so high and cannot be underestimated.
>> Since my mom's diagnosis,
we've since found that both my mom, and my sister and
I are all carriers of the breast cancer gene.
Prevention is so necessary, I don't wanna lose my hair, I
don't wanna lose my breasts and I don't wanna go through chemo.
And I don't want anybody else to have to watch their loved
ones go through the same thing,
just like I had to watch my mom go through it.
>> What is novel about what we're doing at Hopkins is
actually trying to define an individual person's risk of
breast cancer.
And this involves sampling their tissue, sampling their blood,
and looking for changes in single cells.
We are able to extract Incredible amounts of
information from their DNA that can tell us about their inherent
risks, that can tell us about what they've been exposed to and
can hopefully tell us about their subsequent
risk of developing breast cancer.
We would like to devise technology that can accurately
assess a woman's breast cancer risk every five years.
So, we can identify those at high risk and
promptly reduce their risk.
We can also identify those at low risk and
minimize scans and treatment that can cause its own toxicity.
>> A second area of research for us is identification or
development of compounds that could be used for prevention.
We're taking a look at and Curcumin, two natural products.
This is gonna require a considerable amount of work
to identify natural products that might have
anti-cancer properties, or to actually develop drugs from
scratch that can have these effects.
But this is a big effort and
it's gonna take a lot of support, and
it's gonna take a lot of time from dedicated researchers.
Our team is ready to go, they're working on it now.
>> Why this is such an exciting time is that we have tools, we
have the expertise, we have the experience of working together.
And all we now need is funding.
One of the biggest problems with prevention,
studying prevention, has been that notoriously,
it is not being well funded at a government level.
Coz the studies are complex, they take a long time to achieve
the ultimate goal and that is reducing breast cancer risk.
Hence, philanthropic funding is critical if we're ever going to
prevent breast cancer in our lifetime.
>> One in eight women in our country will get breast cancer
in their lifetime.
The way we deal with that risk now is we screen everybody, and
we diagnose breast cancer when it's large enough to be felt or
to be seen on a mammogram.
But we need to do a much better job and
much earlier of identifying who that one woman is.
>> If you said, well, we're not using,
we're waiting until we all have smallpox and then we're gonna
treat people with smallpox, we'd all have smallpox.
So, why would we do that?
Well, they came up with something to prevent
people getting smallpox.
>> Now that my husband and I are expecting our first child,
this research is even more important for
me, because I'm expecting the next generation.
>> You just must change the paradigm.
It's not that cure is not important, it is.
But it can't be the only iron we have in the fire.
We have to think of other ways of trying to reduce breast
cancer mortality.
And prevention is the way that I think we can move forward.
>> And they're researching these things now, so it's happening.
But what we need is to expand what's happening and
be able to make it possible to help more people, and
to make more important advances in science.
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