Nottingham Galway - National University of Ireland, Galway

Introduction from Professor Roger Blamey
Roger Blamey
This is the 2nd in the Nottingham and Galway series of meetings on breast
cancer. The Nottingham International Breast Cancer Conferences have been
held every two years and the intention was to hold the Galway meetings in
the intervening years; the 11th Nottingham meeting has been deferred until
next year and therefore the 2nd meeting in Galway is advanced by one year.
As many of you know, the 1st Galway meeting was a great success. The
programme for the 2nd meeting looks equally inviting.
Both meetings are inclusive of all disciplines within breast cancer. The
difference between them is that the Nottingham meeting is almost entirely
based on invited abstracts on research work recently completed or still in
progress. There are only 6 – 8 over-viewing invited lectures and an afternoon
of workshops for each discipline, again largely research based. The papers
are largely given by the research workers themselves.
The Galway meeting is mainly composed of invited lectures from experts in
the field and has largely a clinical rather than a research basis. The two
excellently compliment one another.
This year we look forward to a mouth-watering set of over-views, ranging
right through the spectrum from risk, through early detection, surgery,
pathology, prognosis, adjuvant therapies through to clinical outcomes in a
large data set and mortality trends, to the use of tumour markers and to
hormonal effects in advanced disease. One session is devoted to mistakes!
It would perhaps have been nice to have had more from the Oncologists on
the diagnosis and management of advanced disease but as usual my desires
for completeness must be constrained by the length of time available! I am
really looking forward to this meeting.
Roger Blamey
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