Dr. John Fetting

John Fetting, a 30-year veteran of the Johns Hopkins faculty, readily discusses the dramatic changes in the treatment of breast cancer that have evolved during his tenure, such as how clinicians now choose a treatment protocol based on the biological characteristics of the cancer as opposed to a patient’s menopausal status. But he’s more interested in addressing what hasn’t yet happened in breast cancer prevention.

That’s why, as he enters the final years of his career, Dr. Fetting is embarking on a fundraising crusade to support of breast cancer prevention research at Hopkins. The John Fetting Fund for Breast Cancer Prevention Research was initiated by one of his patient’s, Leslie Ries, and her husband, Tom. The five-year goal of the recently-initiated fund is $5 million dollars.

“One woman in eight in the United States develops breast cancer in her lifetime. We do not know who that “one” woman will be, so what do we do? We are left to consider all women at risk. We screen all women, currently with mammography, with the goal of diagnosing breast cancer early at a more curable stage. We don’t prevent breast cancer; we diagnose it early. Sometimes that diagnosis still comes too late, and too many women still die of breast cancer. Preventing a cancer is curing a cancer. We have the tools. The same discoveries about the biology of cancer which enable targeted treatment, can be the foundation for a biology of prevention. We know it will take time, so we cannot delay a single day. We need to start now and use what we have already learned about the biology of breast cancer and apply it to breast cancer prevention.”

Encouraged by the field’s vastly increased understanding of the biology of breast cancer, Dr. Fetting expects these advancements to be successfully applied to prevention if the research is adequately supported. “There is strong support for research on cancer treatment. Support for prevention research is much harder to come by. Philanthropy can enable us to take advantage of the tremendous prevention opportunities presented to us by our rapidly increasing understanding of the breast cancer genome and epigenome,” he says.

Leslie S. Ries

Tom and Leslie Reis

Since her own battle with breast cancer in 2004, Leslie Ries wanted to make sure that her own daughters , and the mothers, daughters, and sisters of others would not have to experience the the physical, emotional, and financial scars that come with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Rather than treatment, she envisioned a future where women would never get breast cancer in the first place. The only way to reduce the incidence of breast cancer was to fund medical research on preventing it, and toward that aim, she and her husband Tom established the John Fetting Fund for Breast Cancer Prevention.