The Overlooked

BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN SPENT ON BREAST-CANCER RESEARCH. BUT WOMEN WITH METASTATIC FORMS OF THE DISEASE HAVE RARELY BEEN THE FOCUS

- Kate Pickert

LIANNE KRAEMER HAD BEEN LIVING WITH METASTATIC breast cancer for more than a year when I met her in December 2017 at the Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio. Throughout the week, more than 7,000 doctors, scientists, and pharmaceutical- company representatives would descend on the city for the country’s most important breast-cancer conference. Inside the main exhibition hall, it seemed that every major pharmaceutical company was putting on its best come-hither show. A pair of young, lithe dancers whipped flowing fabric through the air at a booth for the drug Faslodex, a new injectable from Astra Zeneca used to treat women with estrogen fueled advanced breast cancer. Novartis had free cupcakes. Tesaro, a company developing new drugs for BRCA- linked breast cancer, had Nutella- branded ice cream cones. Espresso was available at Eli Lilly, and Pfizer had put out small cups of frozen yogurt. Medtronic, a medical- device company, had breasts of raw chicken at its booth so surgeons could test the PlasmaBlade, its new soft-tissue- dissection knife.

Although I had worked as a health-care journalist for nearly a decade, I had never attended this particular conference. I was there to report on the latest scientific advances in breast cancer, but I was also an interested party. Three years earlier, at the age of 35, I had been diagnosed with breast cancer and begun what would be more than a year of treatment. My cancer responded well to the chemotherapy and targeted drug therapy my doctors prescribed, and I was, according to the evidence, cancer-free. I was grateful, but I wanted to learn more about women with metastatic disease whose breast cancer had managed to carry on despite treatment and spread to other parts of their bodies.