Conference to help tackle aggressive form of breast cancer

Taking place from 9 - 11 March 2011 at the Royal Society in London, the Breakthrough Triple Negative Breast Cancer Conference brings together many of the world’s leading doctors and scientists in the field. They aim to have a big impact for patients through building a consensus on the best current and future treatments for this type of the disease.

Dr Andrew Tutt, Director of the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit at King’s College London, says:  “While some patients with triple negative breast cancer do well with current treatments including chemotherapy, for others it doesn’t work nearly as well. These patients need our urgent attention. We are likely to need to develop several different treatments for these types of breast cancer and by getting the best people together in one room we hope to speed up our progress towards improved survival rates.

“This conference can really help set the agenda for our research over the next few years as we work towards a future free from the fear of breast cancer.”

Triple negative breast cancer accounts for around one in six of all breast cancers with more people affected than are diagnosed with ovarian cancer and three times as many as testicular cancer. Survival rates over five years are about 10 to 20 per cent poorer for triple negative breast cancer than for breast cancer overall. It is also more common in younger women and black women and more likely to recur over the first five years following treatment.

Triple negative breast cancer develops in a quite a different way to most breast cancers. They are defined by what they lack: they are not driven by oestrogen or progesterone hormone receptors or the protein HER2. To further complicate the picture, triple negative breast cancers can be quite different from each other. This suggests there are many different subtypes, each needing different treatments.

The conference will look at how to define the different triple negative breast cancer subtypes, as well as identifying potential future treatments.

Professor Alan Ashworth, Chief Executive of The Institute of Cancer Research, says: “Triple negative breast cancer is associated with poorer survival rates than other forms of the disease. This meeting aims to define how we will improve the outcome of women with this type of breast cancer in the future.”