Fran Visco, president of The National Breast Cancer Coalition, sat down with Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter for a special armchair discussion at the NBCC Advocate Leadership Summit in 2022.

They discuss the history of NBCC and breast cancer activism, including one of the organization’s top accomplishments: the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program. This came after the “$300 Million More” campaign in 1992, which drew in advocates from all across the country.

“We need to do for breast cancer what the AIDS activists are doing for AIDS. Maybe we should all take out our prosthesis and march topless to Congress,” Fran Visco recalled co-founder Susan Love saying in the early days of creating NBCC. “We were really inspired by the AIDS activists.”

In the eyes of Visco and her fellow activists, NBCC had waged “war” against breast cancer.

“When this administration decided to wage a war, you found $7.5 billion to fund it,” Visco said in a 1992 address to Congress. “Women have declared war on breast cancer and you had better find a way to fund that war.

“We will no longer be passive. We will no longer be polite. We can no longer afford to wait while Congress gets around to significant decent funding for breast cancer. We implore you. You must find a way to appropriate the additional $300 million for breast cancer research now. We can accept no less.”

The Cancer History Project Podcast is sponsored by City of Hope, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

A transcript of this conversation, along with an archive of related content, is available on the Cancer History Project: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/fran-visco-tells-the-story-of-nbcc/

If a Mount Rushmore of Epidemiology were to exist, Joseph F. Fraumeni Jr. would be etched into the face of the mountain, former NCI Director Ned Sharpless once told Stephen J. Chanock.

Of the hundreds of scientists Fraumeni mentored, perhaps one of the closest was Stephen J. Chanock, his successor as director of the NCI Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, who worked with Fraumeni for 25 years.

Fraumeni died on June 22. He was 93.

Otis Brawley, co-editor of the Cancer History Project and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology at Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, interviewed Chanock on the most recent episode of the Cancer History Project podcast.

Brawley and Chanock looked back on Fraumeni’s 50-year long career. His contributions to science included co-discovering the Li-Fraumeni syndrome and developing cancer maps, which visualize cancer rate data from every county in the U.S. His work served as a backbone for other major discoveries, such as the two-hit hypothesis by Alfred Knudson and BRCA genes.

Fraumeni developed theories around how cancer works and tested them.

“The mission statement of DCEG has been to understand the etiology of cancer through epidemiology and genetics as a means to prevention or early intervention,” Chanock said. “That's really the wisdom of Joe Fraumeni who lived that, and really developed the tools, the capabilities, and the workforce to pursue that.”

As a result, Fraumeni established a vision of cancer's genetic susceptibility. His observations about diethylstilbestrol raised “a very revolutionary idea” that early exposures could result in precancerous conditions and develop into cancers decades later. The cancer maps added a new attention to cancer caused by environmental exposures.

“These patterns were very important, which led to understandings about what was going on post-World War II and [how] certain occupations are associated with select cancers,” Chanock said. “This led to the birth of a whole set of cohorts and case control studies to look at asbestos, smelters, occupational hazards and smokeless tobacco use in the South.”

The goal was always to help patients, many of whom had no options at the start of Fraumeni’s career.

“What Joe was envisioning was the more we understand, the more we can be honest and explain to our patients who develop cancer or may develop cancer, what we could be done to prevent or decrease that risk,” Chanock said.

The Cancer History Project Podcast is sponsored by City of Hope, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

A transcript of this conversation, along with an archive of related content, is available on the Cancer History Project: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/joseph-f-fraumeni-jr/

When Robert Mayer started his career in pancreatic cancer research in the 1960s, the treatment landscape of pancreatic cancer was dismal.

“We had no tools, say like CT scans, to even identify or diagnose these tumors at an early time,” said Mayer. “Colonoscopy was a big deal. Making a diagnosis of a pancreatic cancer often was restricted to the presence of metastatic disease because there was no scan, no blood test that showed that there was something awry in the pancreas. It was in the back of the abdomen and that didn't change for quite some time.

“The aura developed that [pancreatic cancer] was something that just you couldn't deal with.”

Mayer is now the faculty vice president for Academic Affairs at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and faculty associate dean for Admissions at Harvard Medical School, and is watching this aura is begin to change:

Daraxonrasib, a pan-RAS(on) inhibitor, was shown to double overall survival in the recent RASolute-302 trial phase III clinical trial. The results were presented at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting on May 31.

“As with other conditions that we treat, when patients [with pancreatic cancer] come, we'll be able to give them options, plans, steps,” Mayer said. “It may not necessarily be that we can cure, but we can prolong survival, enhance quality of life, reduce time that they have to come to receive toxic systemic parenteral intravenous therapy. All things that really matter so that they can go and be at high school, college graduations, family celebrations, and do all the things that they otherwise would like to do. That has never been something that happened with pancreas cancer.”

But the road to developing this drug was laden with bumps, jumps, and potholes. Mayer highlighted some of the most notable mileposts on that long journey in this episode of The Cancer History Project Podcast.

The Cancer History Project Podcast is sponsored by City of Hope, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.