YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
Local women share their journey to the top of their professions and the challenges and triumphs they faced along the way. They’re rewriting the script on success and there’s no ceiling.
Alex Erwin is my guest this week. She’s the manager of scientific programs at Susan G. Komen. Her work involves bringing together industry leaders and patient voices to identify gaps in breast cancer research and needs in patient care. She moved back to the Springfield area after the birth of her daughter to be closer to family, and says she benefited from a post-pandemic shift to remote work that made the job at national nonprofit Komen possible. In this conversation, Alex talks about the impact of her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis on her work, and how emigrating to the U.S. from Russia as a child with her single mother has shaped her perspective and identity. She also discusses the ongoing focus of Komen on data collection, aiming to collect information from diverse patient populations to improve health outcomes.
Below is an excerpt from the start of our conversation.
—Christine Temple, Executive Editor
Christine Temple: You (manage) the scientific programs and the research efforts for breast cancer at Susan G. Komen. What does your work entail?
Alex Erwin: We work really kind of collaboratively across Komen, and one of the things that we do is bring the leaders in the research field and the patient voice together to try and identify gaps in the breast cancer field and also try and identify immediate needs that can help the breast cancer community.
Temple: What are some of the projects that you’re working on?
Erwin: One really great example of a project on our team that kind of leverages the patient voice and collaboration is our work around inflammatory breast cancer. This is an aggressive breast cancer that doesn’t really show a lot of the typical signs you think of with breast cancer. So, a lot of times there is no lump and it really looks more like a skin infection. And so kind of that presentation, combined with the fact that women are more likely to be younger when they’re diagnosed, just means a lot of times breast cancer isn’t on the radar, so it gets misdiagnosed or missed a lot. And it’s really critical because it’s also an aggressive cancer. So, by the time you’re seeing the symptoms, it’s already an advanced stage, and so it’s really critical to get the right treatment as soon as possible.
Along with our nonprofit partners, we convened experts in the inflammatory breast cancer space along with patient advocates to really figure out what is the thing that would have the greatest impact for patients. And the answer was a resounding: We need a better way to diagnose this more consistently and more accurately because the approach for diagnosing this breast cancer really hadn’t changed for decades. Our group worked collaboratively to come up with a proposed new diagnostic scoring system, so a new way to diagnose this, and that was published. And then we also funded two of the leading inflammatory breast cancer centers in the world to validate the scoring system.
Since the scoring system in the publication was pretty cumbersome to use – a clinician would have to find the article, they’d have to tally up the scores to get to that to help them in their diagnosis – we wanted to make this more accessible so that clinicians and physicians had the same access to these criteria that the leading centers were using. We worked collaboratively within Komen and with our partners to develop an online version of this tool so now providers can have it in hand in the clinic while they’re seeing patients to hopefully aid them in that diagnosis. We launched the online version of the scoring system last fall.
Temple: What made you want to get into the field of science?
Erwin: I had always been really interested in science, but I think a lot of people owe it to really great educators. So, even in our community, I had great high school teachers at Willard and at Missouri State, and I think one thing that really kind of tied things together was that they would give us really ambitious projects to work on. Just them entrusting us to try and figure out these big problems, I think, also gave us permission to think more ambitiously – maybe we could help address some of the critical needs and unsolved problems in science.
A safe room and classroom addition at Willard Central Elementary School will be used by the music, arts and athletic programs for a district that had 4,536 students last year, according to Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education figures, but school officials say enrollment is projected to grow.
