Olufunmilayo Olopade

“To kill them you have to use chemotherapy, which has all the side effects and may not always work.”

“The estrogen receptor negative tumors are estrogen independent.”

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

“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.””

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“The more compelled I became to figure it out.”

“The more compelling horror stories I heard from my patients.”

“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 hope for precision medicine is to have the right drug for the right person at the right time,”

“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.”

“Right now, most women in the world are diagnosed with breast cancer at an advanced stage.”

“To develop a personalized way to identify every woman at high risk, whether African-American or Jewish or Italian or Ukrainian, so that they could go in and have their doctor develop a personalized approach for them.”

“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.”

“There have been very few studies of women across different populations, so that’s why everyone has focused on my work,. But there are women all over the world Indian women, Hispanic women who develop triple-negative breast cancer, and most of these women didn’t know they were at risk for it.”