The programming team for the 45th annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium® is busy lining up speakers and adding new formats to present the latest clinical and basic research results relating to breast cancer. It recently released the preliminary program with a list of educational sessions, plenary lectures, mini-symposia, and controversies.

The controversies replace the Oxford-style debates that were introduced in 2019. Speakers took opposing views on topics and made arguments to sway the opinion of those attending. There won’t be any type of persuasion this time.

“This is a new session that we are extremely excited about,” said SABCS® co-director Virginia Kaklamani, MD, professor of medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology, at the Mays Cancer Center, UT Health San Antonio. “It is a lightning discussion by experts in the field on topics that will help us to improve patient care.”

There will be two types of controversies: clinical and translational.

Lisa Carey, MD, ScM, FASCO of the UNC-Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center in Chapel Hill, N.C. will moderate the Clinical Controversies. Komal Jhaveri, MD, FACP of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City will moderate the Translational Controversies.

The Clinical Controversies include:

• To Clip or Not to Clip presented by Abigail Caudle, MD of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and Viviana E. Galimberti, MD, MPH of the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, Italy.
• Duration of Endocrine Therapy presented by Kathryn Ruddy, MD, PhD of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Eleftherios “Terry” Mamounas, MD, MSc of the Orlando Health Cancer Institute, Orlando, Fla.
• Post-neoadjuvant Therapy in TNBC presented by Heather McArthur, MD, MPH of UT Southwestern in Dallas, and Susan Domchek, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

The Translational Controversies include:

• RIP MTD presented by Hope S. Rugo, MD, FASCO of the University of California San Francisco, and Geoffrey Shapiro, MD, PhD of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
• Randomized Trials Versus Real World Evidence presented by Angela DeMichele, MD, MSCE of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and Sean Khozin, MD, MPH of CancerLinQ, LLC in New York City.
• Ki-67 presented by Nadia Harbeck, MD, PhD of LMU University Hospital in Munich, and Torsten Nielsen, MD, PhD, FRCPC of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia.

SABCS 2022 will be Dec. 6-10 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. The Symposium registration and hotel reservation portals are open. The call for abstracts is coming soon.