Description

Myra Biblowit, president of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, talks about why she takes breast cancer research personally.

Transcript

The Breast Cancer Research I’ve known Evelyn for a long time, when she wanted to start the foundation in 1993, I helped her, in fact her impetus for it began in about 1989 when she was on the board of Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center and was asked to raise the money to create a state of the art breast center at that facility and she raised the money and in the process really became persuaded that at the end of the day research was what was gonna save lives and the more that we could put money into research and accelerate the investment in research, we would make a difference and there was no organization that had a laser sharp singular focus on doing that. So she called me and she said “I need another job like a hole in the head, but I could do this, I think I can take all of the Estee Lauder counters around the world and launch the pink ribbon as the ubiquitous symbol of breast cancer and I can create a foundation that will support new ideas and really make a difference” and so I helped her find someone and get the foundation off the ground and seven years later I came to run it. You know I'm a science junkie, number one but I did lose my only sister-in-law to breast cancer. I'm an only child. She was the closest thing I had to a sibling and she was 48. And I will tell you that if she were alive today, she would have every chance of living out her life fully either cured or with a manageable chronic disease. The day she died, the American Cancer Society on the front page of the New York Times, it said in American Cancer Society reverses its recommendations and now feels that followup chemotherapy is advocated regardless of the size of the tumor. In the days when she was being treated, her tumor was so small that they said “you don’t need chemotherapy”. Longitudinal studies a decade later proved that those women who didn’t have it lost their battle. So, everyday you hear those stories and people are benefiting enormously from the therapies and from the more targeted therapies so that the quality of life is very different. It's no longer bombard the body, it's bombard the tumor. There is much more targeted therapies and much ore refined understanding of the variations within the disease and the spectrum of the disease.