Olufunmilayo Olopade Quotes

People in Africa have been understudied, and even African-Americans in this country have been understudied.

Instead of waiting for the patients to be diagnosed with cancer, I am increasingly passionate about trying to prevent it.

When I learned that more than 30,000 women in California had joined, and that only 48 Black women in California—or African American women—had joined, that's when I said to Laura [Laura Esserman, MD, MBA, co-investigator and professor at UCSF], “This is unacceptable. You have to come to Chicago, and then we have to open this up nationwide so that an and then we have to open this up nationwide so that any woman who is going to get a mammogram can join.” For me, what I wanted to do is to bring it to the South Side of Chicago in a predominantly African American community, and we wanted to make sure that everyone in our community has a chance to join WISDOM if they wish to. We have found that when you ask women to participate, and they learn about the study, they sign up. And that's what I have learned since 2016. And the reason why women don't sign up for studies is because we didn't ask them, or we didn't make it easy for them to join. So I'm really looking forward to finding out with 100,000 women what's the safest and best factors to use to screen for breast cancer.

Triple-negative breast cancer is not the majority of breast cancer. But if we have drugs that can target the genetic abnormalities in these tumors, and we are able to rapidly conduct global clinical trials, not only can we get studies done quickly, but we can also make it possible for women all over the world to participate in the cures of tomorrow.

The estrogen receptor negative tumors are estrogen independent.

The more compelled I became to figure it out.

We're going to assemble a group from totally different environments to see what might be the common thread.

Ten years later we actually have done that people are increasingly doing risk assessment in their practices, they are counseling women about their familial risk, and they are offering interventions that have been lifesaving for many women from high-risk families.”

Tumors that are estrogen-receptor positive depend on estrogen to grow.

These cancers may be more common among African-American women, but our discovery was really that there are genetic risk factors for breast cancer in all populations.

I thought that if I committed myself to identifying risk factors and then to determining how to lower individual risk, then that would really be a lifelong pursuit.

We need to accelerate prevention that can be adopted in low-resource settings or adopted in this country as a way to help low-income women care for themselves.

medical school in Nigeria, we were always taught that prevention was better than a cure.

By disseminating such information in front of the community of oncologists, we were given the opportunity to change practice

We’ve been very interested in familial breast cancer and the contribution of genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 that predispose families to breast cancer. We’re very interested in looking at the genetic basis of breast cancer in young women. As a result of that investigation, we’re hoping to develop better tools and better methods to manage triple-negative breast cancer, because that’s what we see to be over-represented in young African American women and women with BRCA1 mutations.