Meeting Goals/Purpose

This Symposium is designed to provide state-of-the-art information on the experimental biology, etiology, prevention, diagnosis, and therapy of breast cancer and premalignant breast disease to an international audience of academic and private physicians and researchers.

The scientific program consists of formal lectures by experts in clinical, translational, and basic research, selected slide and poster presentations, forums and case discussions. The official language of the symposium is English. Simultaneous translation is not provided.
 

Target Audience

This international symposium is directed primarily towards academic and private physicians and researchers involved in breast cancer in medical, surgical, gynecologic, and radiation oncology, as well as patient advocates and other appropriate health care professionals. We anticipate 10,000+ attendees from more than 102 countries.
 

Meeting Location

SABCS History: 47 years of growth and innovation

2025 will mark the 48th 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 nearly 2,000 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.)

Executive Committee

Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, UT Southwestern, Harold C. Simmons Cancer Center, Dallas, Texas, Co-Director
Virginia G. Kaklamani, MD, UT Health San Antonio Mays Cancer Center, San Antonio, Texas, Co-Director
Kate Lathrop, MD, UT Health San Antonio Mays Cancer Center, San Antonio, Texas, Program Director
Carissia Calvo–Strube, MD, University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas
Margaret Foti, PhD, MD (hc), American Association for Cancer Research, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Charles M. Perou, PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Hope Rugo, MD, University of California San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, San Francisco, California
Alana Welm, PhD, University of Utah Huntsman Comprehensive Cancer Center, Salt Lake City, Utah
Lei Zheng, MD, PhD, University of Texas Health San Antonio Mays Cancer Center, San Antonio, Texas

Program Planning Committee

Carole Bass, PhD, Advocate, Physical Sciences in Oncology Network at the (USA)National Cancer Institute, Southlake, Texas
Vernal Branch,Independent Research Patient Advocate, Richmond, Virginia
Thelma Brown, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama
David Cescon, MD, PhD, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto, Canada
Fergus Couch, PhD, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota
Christina Curtis, PhD, MSc, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Leif Ellisen, MD, PhD, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Heide Ford, PhD, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado
William Gradishar, MD, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois
Fred Howard, MD, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Seema Khan, MD, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois
Tari A. King, MD, FACS, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts
Marleen Kok, Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Adrian Lee, PhD, Institute for Precision Medicine, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Julia Maues, GRASP, Washington, D.C.
Ben Park, MD, PhD, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee
Pedram Razavi, MD, PhD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York
Sonya Reid, MD, MPH, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Nashville, Tennessee
David Rimm, MD, PhD, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut
Tara Sanft, MD, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut
Christos Sotiriou, MD, PhD, Jules Bordet Institute, Anderlecht, Belgium
Jonathan Strauss, MD, , Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois
Antoinette Tan, MD, MHSc, FACP, Atrium Health Levine Cancer Institute, Charlotte, North Carolina
Alexandra Thomas, MD, FACP, Duke Cancer Institute, Durham, North Carolina
Sara Tolaney, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts
Nicholas Turner, MD, PhD, FRCP, Royal Marsden Institute of Cancer Research, London, United Kingdom
Adrienne Waks, MD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts
Zhi-Ming Shao, MD, PhD, Fudan University Cancer Institute, Shanghai, China

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