The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium® marks its 48th year in 2025. It is 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.
However, the Symposium comes from humble beginnings. 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 was “translational research,” a term coined only 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.
At various points, McGuire and Coltman experimented with simultaneous sessions, clinical research presentations in one hall and laboratory research in another. That approach was abandoned when it became clear that it contradicted McGuire’s premise that clinicians needed to hear and understand basic research and basic researchers needed exposure to clinical research if progress was to be made 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, as well as 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, SABCS grew in attendance and it was soon moved to the San Antonio Convention Center, where it remains today. A key change was a partnership created with the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), which helped the Symposium evolve into a global meeting that unites basic, translational, and clinical research with education on breast cancer.
Note: This summary is based on an account provided by Kent Osborne, MD, for the official blog of the AACR, Cancer Research Catalyst.