SAN ANTONIO (April 9, 2014) – The audit just came in, and the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium is a resounding success for San Antonio — and for breast cancer treatment worldwide.
In December 2013, more than 7,400 breast cancer oncologists, nurses, researchers and advocates attended the SABCS, sponsored by the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at the UT Health Science Center, the American Association for Cancer Research and Baylor College of Medicine. That does not include exhibitors, sponsors, staff and members of the media, who bumped the attendance up to 7,625.
That’s more than $9 million in economic impact for the San Antonio downtown area alone, using the San Antonio Convention and Visitors Bureau economic impact formula.
Another way to calculate the conference’s impact over the past 36 years is to look at the experts from across the world who travel to San Antonio to share and learn the latest information on breast cancer.
“We have a global reach and, having done this since 1977, we have had a longstanding global impact on the care of patients with breast cancer,” said Ismail Jatoi, M.D., Ph.D., chief of surgical oncology at the Health Science Center.
They come from every continent but Antarctica, and from countries as small as Equatorial Guinea. The questions of diagnosis, access to drugs and how clinical drug trials are run in different countries are important global health issues addressed at SABCS. And in 2014, SABCS will host a developing country forum focusing on those questions faced by oncologists and health care workers treating breast cancer in the developing world.
“The SABCS is the largest breast cancer meeting in the world, and the most important gathering of key opinion leaders in breast cancer research,” Dr. Jatoi said.
The Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is one of the elite academic cancer centers in the country to be named a National Cancer Institute (NCI) Designated Cancer Center, and is one of only four in Texas. A leader in developing new drugs to treat cancer, the CTRC Institute for Drug Development (IDD) conducts one of the largest oncology Phase I clinical drug programs in the world, and participates in development of cancer drugs approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. For more information, visit www.ctrc.net.