FRONTIERS OF MEDICINE
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 BY KATE PICKERT
Kraemer was 39
when she found out
her breast cancer
had spread and
formed tumors
inside her brain
Health
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 Anto-
nio. 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 con-
ference. 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. Tes-
aro, 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 fro-
zen yogurt. Medtronic, a medical- device company, had breasts
of raw chicken at its booth so surgeons could test the Plasma-
Blade, 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.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID KASNIC FOR TIME
