Scientific Summary from the Morgan Welch MD Anderson Cancer Center Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) Program 10th Anniversary Conference

Wendy A. Woodward, Massimo Cristofanilli, Sofia D. Merajver, Steven Van Laere, Lajos Pusztai, Francois Bertucci, Fedor Berditchevski, Kornelia Polyak, Beth Overmoyer, Gayathri R. Devi, Esta Sterneck, Robert Schneider, Bisrat G. Debeb, Xiaoping Wang, Kenneth L. van Golen, Randa El-Zein, Omar M. Rahal, Angela Alexander, James M. Reuben, Savitri Krishnamurthy, Anthony Lucci, Naoto T. Ueno

In 2006, a remarkable collaboration between University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center clinicians and Texas and New Mexico State legislators led to the formation of a dedicated IBC Research Program and Clinic at MD Anderson. This initiative provided funding and infrastructure to foster coordination of an IBC World Consortium of national and international experts, and launch the first ever IBC international conference in 2008, which brought together experts from around the world to facilitate collaborations and accelerate progress. Indeed great progress has been made since then. National and international experts in IBC convened at the 10th Anniversary Conference of the MD Anderson IBC Clinic and Research Program and presented the most extensive sequencing analysis to date comparing IBC to non-IBC, gene- and protein-based immunoprofiling of IBC versus non-IBC patients, and converging lines of evidence on the specific role of the microenvironment in IBC. Novel models, unique metabolic mechanisms, and prominent survival pathways have been identified and were presented. Multiple clinical trials based on the work of the last decade are in progress or in development. The important challenges ahead were discussed. This progress and a coordinated summary of these works are presented herein.