RISE UP for breast cancer 2024: conference highlights & takeaways

RISE UP (Revolutionizing Investigations to StEp Up Prevention) for breast cancer brought together leading cancer specialists, women's health providers, basic and population scientists, regulators, politicians, industry leaders, patient advocates, and more from around the world to discuss and chart a radical rethinking of breast cancer prevention and risk reduction through a lens of hormonal management across a woman's life course. The presentations at RISE UP were organized to outline a path forward by leveraging what we know about breast cancer biology, early detection, treatment, and endocrine therapy toward a better and sustainable approach for breast cancer prevention. Important conference considerations were to expand our thinking about prevention by broadly considering how the hormonal environment during different life phases or common benign conditions could be better managed to minimize breast cancer risk. This set the stage for transitioning to advances in risk prediction, promising risk-reducing agents, and biomarker-driven trials to test them. Biomarker-based trials discussed focused on 1) lower or intermittent doses of standard prevention agents, 2) drugs already approved for other health purposes, and 3) maximizing benefits from lifestyle interventions alone or in combination. Throughout RISE UP, there was a strong focus on promoting health equity, including comprehensive reproductive health access, equitable representation in clinical trials, and strategies to educate women, providers, and advocates about disparities in care and how to successfully reduce them. The meeting concluded with a competition for innovative approaches to breast cancer prevention that could be integrated into hormonal and women's health interventions. RISE UP was an innovative conference that provided a forum for cross-cutting topics in women's health that do not currently exist. The insights shared at RISE UP will be paradigm shifting in breast cancer prevention and women's health space in the years to come.