SABCS History: 47 years of growth and innovation
2024 marks the 47th year of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, now the largest breast cancer research gathering in the world, with more than 10,000 registered attendees from 102 countries presenting 1,886 accepted abstracts in sessions over four days in December.
The symposium comes from humble beginnings though. In 1978, Bill McGuire, MD, and Chuck Coltman, MD, worked together at the Division of Medical Oncology at the University of Texas Health Science Center. The pair decided to establish a local breast cancer symposium designed to provide a venue for the education of oncologists working in the city. The first symposium, held in a small motel near the airport, had no more than 50 attendees.
The meeting grew slowly until McGuire and Coltman decided to change the scope of the meeting to encompass more research by inviting abstracts for oral or poster presentation. McGuire thought that it would be best for clinicians to hear about basic research and for the lab researchers to hear about clinical research and issues affecting patients. Retrospectively, what McGuire was really thinking about at this time was “translational research,” a term that was only coined years later (1991) to describe a “new type of research” during the development of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Specialized Program of Research Excellence grant program. With this new format, the meeting grew rapidly and was moved to the Hyatt Regency Hotel on the river in downtown San Antonio, and eventually to the Marriott Rivercenter, where it stayed for many years.
McGuire and Coltman experimented a few times with simultaneous sessions, clinical research presentations in one hall and laboratory research in another, but that approach was rapidly abandoned when it became clear that this violated McGuire’s premise that clinicians needed to hear and understand basic research and basic researchers needed exposure to clinical research if we were going to make progress in curing breast cancer.
Although a few attendees complained about the joint sessions, most embraced the idea, which continues to this day. McGuire and Coltman were ahead of their time in fostering the idea of enhancing translation of basic discoveries to the clinic. The symposium was also among the first to include patient advocates in meeting planning and participation in educational and case discussion sessions. Later, Amy Langer, a pioneer in the advocacy movement, would deliver one of the W. L. McGuire Memorial Lectures.
Every year the meeting grew in attendance and soon it was moved to the San Antonio Convention Center, where it remains. A key change was a partnership created with the American Association for Cancer Research, which helped the symposium evolve into a global meeting that unites basic, translational, and clinical research with education on breast cancer.
(Note: Much of this history was written by Kent Osborne, MD, for the American Assocation for Cancer Research. Read his full first-person account.)