Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium Awarded $15 Million in Funding from the National Cancer Institute
Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium Awarded $15 Million Program Project Renewal for "Advancing Equitable Risk-based Breast Cancer Screening and Surveillance in Community Practice."
The Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) was awarded a 5-year $15 million Program Project grant renewal from the National Cancer Institute titled “Advancing Equitable Risk-based Breast Cancer Screening and Surveillance in Community Practice”. The overarching goal of this national research project is to improve early breast cancer detection of aggressive tumors and optimize screening and surveillance using risk-based approaches. The Program renewal follows the premise that screening and surveillance will be most effective and equitable when all women have access to high-quality risk assessment and breast imaging, and when screening and surveillance strategies are targeted to clinically meaningful outcomes. The BCSC has advanced the science of risk-based screening and surveillance by: (1) identifying risk factors most predictive of invasive breast cancer for racial and ethnic groups; (2) defining and evaluating advanced cancer as a clinically meaningful screening outcome and developing a model to predict cumulative advanced cancer risk despite screening; (3) assessing new and supplemental imaging technologies and their use in underserved populations; (4) identifying women’s acceptance of risk-based screening and screening frequency preferences; and (5) identifying breast cancer survivors at high risk of an interval second breast cancer.
With this new grant the BCSC will conduct three complementary Projects. Project 1 aims to develop equitable advanced breast cancer risk models that incorporate imaging features, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm scores, social determinants of health, and clinical factors; and compare the benefits and harms of targeting screening frequency based on advanced cancer risk. Project 2 takes a multilevel approach to identify woman-, neighborhood-, radiologist-, and facility-level factors that drive inequities in breast cancer screening performance and outcomes, and to explore whether targeted AI use and other facility-level interventions can improve population outcomes with attention to health equity. Project 3 seeks to improve equitable surveillance by reducing surveillance failures (interval second breast cancers) at the points of risk stratification and imaging interpretation and examining social determinants of health as multilevel drivers of surveillance failures and targets for future interventions.
The Program leverages the BCSC’s robust, community-based, prospective data collection from geographically and socio-demographically diverse settings and established Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) modeling groups to support the clinical and policy translation of Program findings. Program findings will play a critical role in public health efforts to promote equitable, risk-based screening and surveillance and reduce breast cancer disparities.
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Posted by: Diana Miglioretti, Karla Kerlikowske, and Anna Tosteson