It’s powerful what happens when patients, caregivers, and clinicians come together to look at research priorities; a broad list of questions that encompasses a variety of viewpoints emerges.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about new metastatic breast cancer treatments that can greatly extend the lives of many people in Canada. Targeted therapies are changing the landscape for mBC in a big way.

February 4^th marks World Cancer Day, a global event that takes place every year uniting people around the world who are concerned about the fight against cancer. Currently, 8.8 million people die from cancer globally every year and breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women.

This year I was honoured to participate as a patient representative on the steering committee of the Canadian Cancer Research Conference hosted by the Canadian Cancer Research Alliance at the beginning of November. 

This holiday season consider adding CBCN to your list for charitable giving! Here’s what you’ll be supporting.

CBCN is excited to announce that we’ve been awarded an international SPARC grant, Seeding Progress and Resources for the Cancer Community: Metastatic Breast Cancer Challenge, to develop a mBC Financial Resources Navigation Tool.

Increasingly the not-for-profit advocacy world has been clouded with criticism of industry funding. Many critics believe that any organization that receives funding from the pharmaceutical industry is automatically biased, but this ignores the great pains that health charities often go through to remain unbiased, ethical and credible. And it certainly does not reflect the patient-centric approach that CBCN takes.

How valuable is patient input to decision-makers and how can we work to make sure that the patient voice is really being heard? These are just some of the important questions that I and many others gathered to discuss at the annual Breast Cancer Patient Group Forum in Vienna, Austria.

Recently, I celebrated my 5-year anniversary at CBCN. The thing that has become the most evident to me over these 5 years is that every single person’s experience with breast cancer is unique. Just when I think I’ve heard every story, I meet or hear from someone new and am reminded that every person diagnosed with breast cancer in this country has their own set of experiences and challenges to overcome while dealing with their diagnosis. 

This June I had the opportunity to attend the Europa Donna Metastatic Breast Cancer Advocacy Conference in Italy. The chair of our board, Cathy, was asked to speak and I was happy to join her to share with the group the advocacy that CBCN has been doing in Canada. While most of the participants that attended were representing various organizations, it was interesting learning that many of them were also women who were living with metastatic breast cancer.