Highlighting advances in science during Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Breast Cancer Awareness Month is an opportunity to unite as a community to honor breast cancer survivors and raise awareness about progress researchers and clinicians have made in advancing science.

In recent decades, we have seen remarkable progress in the fight against cancer. The cancer death rate has fallen 22 percent since its peak in 1991, and the chances that a cancer patient will live 5 years or more has increased by 39 percent across all cancers. For breast cancer, the survival rate has increased 21 percent.

These major gains are attributable to new cancer medicines, along with screening and prevention efforts, from which all parts of society can benefit. For example, by reducing the cancer death rate by 10 percent, roughly $4.4 trillion in economic value is added to current and future generations.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month is also an opportunity to remember loved ones.

Take Research and Hope Community Champion Award Winner Rick Dunetz, for example. When his mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, he decided to take his love for coaching volleyball and channel his energy and enthusiasm for the game into an avenue for change. When he saw the change in his mother and his team the season after she was diagnosed, he knew that to “face adversity without fear of failing” was his challenge. Ultimately, his mother lost her fight with metastatic breast cancer. But his dedication to research and knowledge moved him to create The Side-Out Foundation as a way to fundraise for breast cancer research. He said in a recent Conversations piece that his foundation “believe[s] the tools to fight the disease are developing rapidly by small and large teams working together to enable a new ‘Standard of Care’ that will ultimately lead to a cure.”

Teams like his, along with teams of all sizes across the biopharmaceutical industry, are working to tell these stories of hope that innovation, research and ultimately medicines bring to patients and their families. Every day we come closer to a cure.

For more information about how biopharmaceutical companies are fighting cancer, visit http://www.fromhopetocures.org/fighting-cancer. And if you’re looking to get involved in bring awareness to breast cancer, share this post or use the hashtag #BreastCancerAwareness through the end of this week.