High-risk Disease, Novel Treatments, Health Care Equity Highlighted at SABCS

It will be a packed 4 days at the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), which will once again take place in a hybrid fashion, with attendees tuning in from their remote location of choice or checking out the myriad in-person sessions at the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center by San Antonio’s famous River Walk.

There will be poster and spotlight sessions, along with daily clinical research workshops, basic science workshops, education sessions, discussion forums, and plenary lectures and mini-symposia from experts in clinical and basic research.

Day 1, Tuesday, December 6, kicks off with several spotlight poster discussions covering such areas as accelerating drug development in the postneoadjuvant setting, statistical consideration for precision medicine, and living with metastatic disease—itself covering such topics as financial toxicity and palliative care. Important areas addressed in the conferences first educational session block will address metastatic disease and novel therapeutic agents. The day will be rounded out by presentations that focus on health equity, treatment disparities, and updated date from several trials, among them RxPONDER, TAILORx, and SOFT.

Wednesday, December 7, will kick off with the opening address from Virginia Kaklamani, MD, of UT Health San Antonio and Carlos Arteaga, MD, of UT Southwestern Medical Center, this year’s recipient of the Giants of Cancer Care award for breast cancer. The William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture will follow—McGuire cofounded SABCS in 1977 with Charles A. Coltman, MD—and be given by Baylor College of Medicine’s Jeffrey Rosen, PhD, who will discuss translational breast cancer research. DESTINY-Breast02 and DESTINY-Breast03 data are also being presented on day 2, as are such major topics as HER-2 disease and immunotherapy.

On Day 3, December 8, a highlight will be presentation of the Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in Basic Science to Geoffrey M. Wahl, PhD, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, who will then present “Guardian at the Gates: Genome Stability, Cell State, Plasticity, and Breast Cancer.” Featured afternoon sessions comprise themed forums on translational controversies and CDK inhibitors, managing hereditary risk in breast cancer, and challenging breast cancer types, including metaplastic, inflammatory, and lobular/pleomorphic breast cancers.

The final full day of SABCS will be Friday, December 9. Discussions will address new insights on endocrine therapy, updates in human epidermal growth factor receptor 2–positive disease, and breast cancer prevention in premenopausal disease. Adetunji T. Toriola, PhD, MPH, of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, will receive this year’s AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research, and Norman Wolmark, MD, FACS, FRCSC, of UPMC Hillman Cancer Center/University of Pittsburgh and NRG Oncology, will receive the Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in Clinical Research.

Attendees can expect to put into practice what they learned at this year’s conference, with pregnancy-related breast cancer issues, and patient outcomes from a plethora of treatment regimens, rounding out the day.

A morning session on Saturday, December 10, will bring SABCS to a close with a year-in-review discussion on basic and translational sciences and early and advanced breast cancers.

Additional topics being covered throughout the conference include metabolic dysregulation in breast cancer and its impact on treatments, including obesity-related studies; data on patient quality of life and novel antibody-drug conjugates; treatment sequencing; and novel endocrine treatments in the setting of metastatic hormone receptor–positive disease.