Breast cancer care: Access to the best affordable care for every patient; this was the take home message from the 13th International Breast Cancer Conference held at St Gallen (SG-BCC) in March 2013, which was attended by over 3600 international participants.

Reporting the highlights from the meeting in ecancermedicalscience, Professor Giuseppe Curigliano et al outline the main outcomes and recommendations from St Gallen.

The last decade has seen a technological explosion in cancer biology and terms such as  ‘genomics, proteomics, high throughput sequencing, molecular predictors for risk stratification, immune signatures etc. ‘ are routinely addressed at all the major cancer conferences.  The SG-BCC was no exception.  The 50 member expert panel, who put together the St Gallen consensus statement, was charged with assessing the data presented at the 3-day meeting and providing expert opinion on how best the advances coming from a better understanding of cancer biology can be translated swiftly and economically into patient benefit.

The recommendations that the panel came up with will be released later this year but the main issue that arose during the consensus conference is the increasing gap between what is theoretically feasible in patient stratification (genomic testing, next generation sequencing, disease segmentation) and treatment (targeted agents, immunotherapy) and the daily practice. This was the common theme of the whole meeting. Can all the new “omics” data really be transferred into daily clinical practice? This is a major concern shared by all oncologists. At the moment the process is so complex, costly and time consuming that many potentially useful discoveries will never make it. Without a fundamental change this innovation gap will only become larger. A new model whereby academics, clinicians, patients, private companies and policy makers work together to deliver new treatments without the current delay and costs is urgently required.

For more details read the conference report in full here: DOI: 10.3332/ecancer.2013.299