Susan G. Komen Austin

Biosimilar pharmalogics are made from living organisms and offer a new and exciting way to treat breast cancer which can be less expensive, have fewer side effects and replicate the results of their chemical based counterparts.Dr. Chen earned her medical degree from the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania and her Master’s of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  She is a breast cancer medical oncologist and cancer epidemiologist. She works with the Nurses’ Health Study and has published extensively on nutritional, lifestyle, and hormonal factors that influence breast cancer risk and survival.  She also has a particular interest in translating epidemiologic findings to breast cancer clinical practice.  She is currently the study chair for the Aspirin for Breast Cancer (ABC) Trial, a large randomized trial of aspirin vs placebo to prevent breast cancer recurrence run through the Alliance of Clinical Trials in Oncology in the United States. Thank you to our partners who made this podcast possible - Merk and Amgen Oncology.

We are getting more and more sophisticated in determining the types of breast cancer tumors and how they act in the body.  Dr. Knutson and his team at the Mayo clinic are working to discover how biologics play an important role with targeted therapies.Dr. Knutson is internationally recognized in the field of cancer immunology. His research focuses on the immunology and immunotherapy of breast and ovarian cancers, both the basic immunobiology and clinical translation, including clinical trials. His contributions to science include clinical development and testing of self-tumor antigen-specific vaccines in patients with breast and ovarian cancers. He currently has three FDA-approved vaccine trials underway and is principal investigator of 3 Department of Defense grants to test vaccines aimed at preventing recurrence in breast cancer, including triple negative breast cancer for which there are no targeted therapies.

Thanks to Amen Oncology and Merck for making this podcast possible.

Jill Ramirez has made it her personal mission to make sure the Latino community in Austin, Texas has healthcare.  She's spent decades educating her community, training community health workers, and making sure Latinos know how to access healthcare.

In this episode we talk about the barriers to breast healthcare for this growing community.

Getting back to feeling whole is a vital part of breast cancer recovery.  Having to lose one or more breasts during the treatment phase is not just physically taxing, it can scar mentally forever.  Dr. Fisher and her team work with patients to change that.

Chemotherapy has been a gold standard for treatment of breast cancer and often over-treats women who may not need this aggressive treatment to treat their breast cancer.  Dr. Sparano serves as the study chair for the TAILORx clinical trial sponsored by National Cancer Institute, the first clinical trial integrating a mulitparameter gene expression assay in clinical decision making for adjuvant therapy with early stage ER-positive, HER2 negative breast cancer.  The results will eliminate the use of chemotherapy for thousands of women.

When it's time for reconstructive surgery, there are so many options and opportunities it can be daunting for someone faced with this reality.  Dr. Potter specializes in natural reconstruction and in this episode talks about the options available today.  Board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, she completed her undergraduate studies at Princeton University with a focus in Molecular Biology. She received her medical degree from the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Following a Plastic Surgery Integrated Residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, she completed a Reconstructive Plastic Surgery and Microsurgery Fellowship with MD Anderson in Houston, Texas. Dr. Potter specializes in natural breast reconstruction and has performed over 750 DIEP flap surgeries using patients’ natural fat and tissue.