When BIG co-founder and chair, Professor Martine Piccart, first began to meet with the NABCG in the late 1990s to share research plans and priorities between the two organisations, she did not imagine the immensely fruitful collaboration that has emerged.
Starting with small, short, early morning meetings at each year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) congress, the collaboration has evolved into a major international partnership with multiple research and guideline programmes under its belt, and an annual one-day meeting of its own to discuss progress and plan ahead.
“It wasn’t long before we agreed that a one-hour meeting at ASCO only gave us a very superficial idea of the capabilities of these two important breast cancer research networks. We therefore set up a forum for much more in-depth discussions about how we could work together to our mutual benefit, and held our first formal meeting during the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in 2005,” recalls Piccart.
Since then, the BIG-NABCG collaboration has established joint research programmes aimed at answering major questions currently facing clinicians and patients with breast cancer. Today, these include investigating the effects of interrupting hormone treatment for young women with luminal breast cancer so they can become pregnant, optimising treatment of metastatic breast cancer, and exploring the place of immunotherapy. In addition, the collaboration has helped to standardise aspects of diagnostic and research methodology, such as Ki67 assessment [1-4] and endpoints in adjuvant and neoadjuvant trials [5,6] and led to a much-needed research initiative in male breast cancer.
Together, BIG and NABCG are addressing some of the most challenging aspects of breast cancer research, such as male breast cancer, that are not supported by the pharmaceutical industry.