On Saturday 20 March 2021, during the 17th St. Gallen International Breast Cancer Conference, Prof David Cameron will give a lecture to honour the memory of Professor Aron Goldhirsch.
For the first time, a lecture[1] will be given to honour the memory of Professor Aron Goldhirsch, co-founder of BIG, who passed away in February 2020. Professor David Cameron, Chair of BIG, has been entrusted to give this presentation, and we had the pleasure to ask him a few questions before his talk.
Could you list the key stages in the evolution of adjuvant therapies to its current role in patients with breast cancer?
- Early investigators being brave enough to try chemotherapy and endocrine therapy;
- Recognising the existence of predictive markers for some treatments (i.e., endocrine therapy is only for hormone receptor-positive tumours, not all);
- Longer duration of endocrine therapy
- Large, multi-centre, multi-national trials!
- Meta-analyses of trials to get precise estimates of benefits from all the women who enrolled in trials – none of the information is wasted!
How effective are adjuvant therapies today compared to 20 years ago?
Apart from trastuzumab (not available 20 years ago), the individual therapies are not that much better. However, an area where some success is evident, is combining many different therapies into a treatment programme.
Could you describe Aron’s role in the evolution of adjuvant therapies across time and in the evolution of academic research?
His role has been KEY, setting standards for trial design and the questions, and providing leadership in building multi-centre, multi-national trials and building consensus about how patients should be treated.
BIG has been active for over 20 years; what challenges do you perceive for academic research groups and the BIG network in the future?
A need for greater collaboration and increasing challenges in securing non-commercial funding for clinical trials.
Professor Aron Goldhirsch
Professor Aron Goldhirsch, the “father” of BIG and a founder of the International Breast Cancer Study Group (IBCSG), passed away at the age of 73 on 26 February 2020. Throughout his career, Prof Goldhirsch made significant contributions to breast cancer medicine and education and, besides his many national duties, he worked tirelessly to foster international collaboration and preserve academic independence in cancer research. Much of this work was conducted in the context of his leadership within the International Breast Cancer Study Group (www.ibcsg.org), of which he was a founder. In 1996, together with Dr Piccart, Prof Goldhirsch created the Breast International Group (BIG) with the aim of bringing together academic research groups.
He was also one of the main contributors to the St Gallen International Expert Consensus Conference, which gives practicing oncologists recommendations on how to optimise treatment for patients with early breast cancer.
[1] Saturday, 20 March 2021, 13.30-14.00 (CET). Aron Goldhirsch Memorial Lecture: Evolution of adjuvant therapies across the time and the future of cooperative academic clinical research Groups, David Cameron (UK). Introduction by Alan Coates (Australia). Co-chair: Michael Gnant (Austria).
