Breast cancer research has been the frontrunner in many fields of cancer research: epidemiology, life-style and genetic risk factors, secondary prevention, conservative surgery, molecular classification, curative adjuvant therapies, neoadjuvant treatments, targeted agents, survival prolongation in advanced stages. Thanks to this knowledge, today many breast cancers can be prevented, most can be diagnosed at early stages and cured and the minority of patients at advanced stages can still enjoy a significant survival with a reasonable quality of life.
As a consequence of these major improvements, the bar of research and clinical excellence for breast cancer has raised even more.
New prognostic and predictive biomarkers are available, need to be validated and to be implemented in trial design and clinical practice. Risk-adapted surgery and radiation therapy allow for less and less invasive procedures. Multiple effective adjuvant therapies in the different molecular breast cancer subtypes, require a more precise definition of risk and predictivity of drug efficacy, to allow for a rational de-escalation or escalation of curative treatments. The impressive advances in the treatment of advanced breast cancers, envisage the possibility of cure with a multimodality approach for some patients and guarantee a prolonged survival for most of them with a rational sequencing of treatments.
The 21th AIBCC in Padova, will allow to sum up the most recent biological and clinical achievements and to allow an open and friendly discussion of clinical cases among key opinion leaders and participants.