Dr Funmi Olopade Previews Her Keynote Address for SABCS

Funmi Olopade, MD, FACP, professor of medicine and human genetics and founding director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics and Global Health at the University of Chicago Medical Center, previews her SABCS keynote address on solidarity after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Transcript

As you think about your message for the keynote address at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), what messages are you hoping to share with the attendees?

It's about solidarity; solidarity in access to clinical trials; solidarity in access to screening studies; solidarity in joining WISDOM wherever you are, so we can learn about the best way to screen women. It doesn't have to be that the US is the best way to go forward, because SABCS is going to have participants from all over the world. We can learn from all over the world who is doing best with controlling this pandemic. Certainly not the US—we've lost too many lives. And yet we have spent the most money on health care, so we can do better.

I hope that every one of us will go back to thinking about, what are the best practices globally and how can we use innovation going forward to accelerate progress? It's going to be innovation, science, and technology. Yes, we can do faith-based interventions, we can practice faith-based medicine, but we cannot continue to deny science. So, hopefully, science and technology would allow us to do better in the future.