Short promotional/discussion video (YouTube) about the Athena Breast Health Network, a University of California Medical Centers collaboration to improve breast cancer screening, prevention, treatment, and survivorship. Speakers emphasize the personal/familial impact of breast cancer, note that ~35,000 U.S. women still die annually from breast cancer, and introduce the Wisdom trial — a risk-stratified screening study designed to enroll large numbers (up to 100,000 women) using technology (Salesforce platform) to scale recruitment, data capture, and personalized care. The video calls for broad participation and frames precision screening as a way to reduce harm from unnecessary screening while targeting those at higher risk.
Questions this video answers
35,000 women a year
Age 40 (annual mammography starting at age 40)
100,000 women
September 21, 2015
20 years
Chapters
Breast cancer affects us all. It's not just the women. It affects the men. It affects every family member.
There's a lot of fear, especially with having lost my mother and then my grandmother on my father's side. When people think of cancer, I think everyone has a different story.
We have made enormous progress in the treatment of breast cancer, but that's not good enough. There are 35,000 women a year in the United States alone who are still dying of breast cancer. Until that stops, we have to do better.
Every woman just wants to do their best in taking care of themselves, but the advice that they're hearing is confusing. Even providers don't know the best advice to give their patients.
Athena is a collaboration by the University of California Medical Centers to really change the way we screen, prevent, treat, and manage the survivorship of all women with breast cancer.
Normally, women as of age 40 are screened every year by mammography. That doesn't diversify whether somebody has a high risk or a low risk to develop disease. And what we are going to implement with the Wisdom trial is to look at their individual risk. There are many women, their risk is so low that screening actually will do more harm than good.
How to use technology to make sure no one slips through the cracks. That's what the whole precision medicine idea is about, that you don't treat everybody the same.
I think it's really important that the experience become more personalized, that we have care and treatment tailored to our specific individual needs.
To do a breast cancer screening trial, you have to have a lot of patients over a long period of time.
The only way to have confidence is to have data. Salesforce platform is allowing us to conduct trials in a completely different way. We can conduct a trial of 100,000 women. We can do it fast, and we can do it very efficient.
Until now, we've not had the tools to really capture that data, analyze it, and then apply it to the real world, to making progress for a better future.
What's really interesting, if you really focus on that for a second, you think, okay, there's Salesforce. You're trying to optimize your sales and your marketing, and you're trying to be precise about how you target. That's really not that different from targeting therapy to the right people. The outcome can actually be really remarkable.
I have been working towards this for the last 20 years, and now I feel like we're really almost there. And that's, I think, where the energy comes. It's so exciting to know we've designed the Wisdom trial so everyone can participate. That's what we're inviting people to do. If we want the future to be better, we all have to make it better.
This is our opportunity to have an impact on our own care as well as the care of our mothers, our sisters, our friends, our daughters.
It will help make medicine more empowering and also build this knowledge base for future generations.
Stay strong. Stay positive. We can all do this. We can all do this together.
