The University of California is launching an unprecedented statewide collaboration for breast cancer patients with the goal of revolutionizing the course of care by designing and testing new approaches to research, technology and health care delivery. The ATHENA Breast Health Network, www.athenacarenetwork.org, will harness UC’s collective power into a common cause: battling breast cancer.
The ATHENA investigators share a common vision to enable personalized medicine and drive innovation in breast cancer prevention, screening and treatment by developing common systems, partnering with industry and providing state-of-the-art molecular diagnostics that can analyze a breast cancer tumor and categorize the risk of breast cancer recurrence. They also will create a biospecimen repository that tracks mammograms, biopsy specimens, cancer specimens and serial blood specimens to allow large-scale comparative research to help tailor treatments.
Hosted at the University of California San Francisco, the ATHENA project will involve 150,000 women throughout California who will be screened for breast cancer and followed for several decades through the five UC medical centers. Women who present for breast cancer screening at the five UC medical centers and their affiliates will be enrolled into the ATHENA Breast Health Network and followed for decades. All women undergoing screening and treatment will be offered the opportunity to collaborate by contributing information about themselves, any risk factors they have, including health status, and other related lifestyle behaviors, such as diet, tobacco and drug use, environmental factors, gynecological history and family risk. This information will be used to help target prevention services now and in the future. Athena is statewide and multi-institutional, including both the universities and their associated medical centers. Peering and granted trust are key attributes of this collaboration.
The potential shared rewards of this collaboration are significant. The result will be a network that enables personalized care informed by science and that fuels the accelerated and continuous improvement in treatment options and outcomes. The ATHENA model could be applied to many other medical conditions including other cancers, diabetes or heart disease. It has the potential to ultimately change health care delivery. The commitment to this project is long lasting and will span several decades.
“By working together, you can do it much faster,” said Laura J. Esserman MD, MBA, ATHENA Principle Investigator Director, UCSF Breast Care Center. “You need a critical mass. Together, we have it. Alone, it’s too expensive.”
