On 8th of October 2021, the Champalimaud Foundation will present the 4th virtual dissemination event of the European Project BOUNCE: Predicting Effective Adaptation to Breast Cancer to Help Women BOUNCE Back. An interdisciplinary consortium of experts from Italy, Finland, Israel, Greece, and Portugal was formed in 2017 in response to a HORIZON 2020 call for Personalised Medicine research and innovation solutions.
The product of this collaboration was BOUNCE, a funded project developed to explore factors that influence breast cancer patients’ long-term psychological resilience and their capacity to resume a normal everyday life and work, following breast cancer treatments.
A clinical pilot run in 4 medical centres recruited 817 participants between November 2018 and February 2020. For 18 months, biomedical, psychological and functional data was collected every 3 months in this longitudinal pilot, and as of August 2021, 504 patients have completed the study. With the use of data mining tools and applied machine learning approaches, the project has actively contributed to the identification of factors and processes that may predict the patients’ resilience and their wellbeing, along the care pathway. This model will provide information on which combination of factors undermine the adjustment to cancer, allowing for early identification of women at risk and design of appropriate interventions.
The use of electronic patient reported outcomes in this study was beneficial in allowing participants to track their own wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling deeper self-understanding and empowering patients. The aim of the Bounce 4th dissemination event will be to present some preliminary data achieved form the work so far, as well as to promote awareness of mental health in breast cancer patients, discussing multidisciplinary care path approaches, and the latest biomedical research of depression.
For more information about the event and registration, follow this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/predicting-effective-adaptation-to-breast-cancer-to-help-women-bounce-back-tickets-177595271237
By Chariklia Tziraki, MD, PhD, Hebrew University of Jerusalem