Big doins in the world of mets these days. And by mets, I mean metastatic breast cancer, not the baseball team. And by big doins, I mean the upcoming Northwest Metastatic Breast Cancer conference, which is happening Friday and Saturday, September 22 and 23, in Seattle.
This party is being thrown with help from Komen Puget Sound and lots of other orgs. And it’s being held at Amazon Web Services which (for out-of-towners) is in South Lake Union not far from Fred Hutch, the cancer research cancer where I’ve been working these past (nearly) four years. And this thing is going to be the bomb.
Is it weird to be geeking out over a cancer conference? Yes, absolutely. But that’s how it is these days. I’ve gotten sciency, people, which is a pretty strange turn of events considering the bad taste for science my condescending 7th grade teacher Mr. Sargo left in my mouth.
Hmmm … is it too late to switch majors? Does this lab coat make my butt look big? ; )
This is the second annual NW MBC conference and it looks to be even bigger, better and more bad ass than last year’s inaugural event. The force behind it? Dynamic duo Beth Caldwell and Lynda Weatherby, two MBC patient advocates who’ve somehow managed to corral cancer peeps from nearly every MBC advocacy organization in the country to speak at the conference.
And then there are the researchers. There will be a handful of scientists from Fred Hutch; a few folks from Virginia Mason and Swedish, including the onc who treated me (sounds like a movie title, doesn’t it?); people from the Broad Institute/Harvard, birthplace of the Metastatic Breast Cancer Project. And lots, lots more.
Topics include integrative oncology; inflammation; health disparities; financial toxicity; clinical trials; vaccines; and research, research and more research. There’s even going to a special session on filling in the mets recurrence data that’s currently missing from the SEER Cancer Registry (more on that here).
Breakout sessions will cover mets sites (liver, lung, brain, etc.) and cancer types (triple negative, HER2, etc.). There’s even going to be a session on lobular breast cancer (my particular flavor) with experts from the University of Pittsburgh.
As I always like to say, knowledge is power. Even more powerful? Free knowledge that might save your life — or the life of a friend! And this conference is free, folks. Here’s the full agenda.
Just so you can see what you’re getting into, here’s a link to a piece I wrote last year that talks a bit about the first conference. I’ll be covering it again this year. If you can make it, please come by and say hello (I’ll be the frazzled blonde furiously live tweeting and scribbling notes in a reporter’s notebook).
If you can’t make it, the word on the street is, it will be livestreamed. Check the Komen Puget Sound website and/or FB page for more details on that.
Peace out, peeps. I’m going to go measure my P-values.
Double Whammied 
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