The keynote speaker got the flu and the morning sunshine turned to sloppy rain, but hope, health and science continued to shine brightly at the third annual Northwest Metastatic and Lobular Breast Cancer Conference, held Friday and Saturday in Seattle.
Created for patients by patients, the conference was facilitated by funding from Komen Puget Sound and a slew of sponsors, chief among them Amazon Web Services, which hosted more than 300 patients, researchers, caregivers and vendors at its downtown meeting center for the second year in a row. AWS also provided free livestreaming so thousands of patients across the country could virtually attend (links available here, here and here). In addition, there was on-site interpretation and translation for Spanish-speakers, and a side session in Spanish for patients and community health workers was broadcast via the Consulate of Mexico in Seattle’s Facebook page.
How do you combat metastatic breast cancer which, despite all the advances and the “awareness,” still kills roughly 41,000 women and men every year? For these conference organizers, it’s by disseminating information, clinical trial opportunities and resources as relentlessly as cancer spreads its deadly seeds.
