Whether Laura Esserman, M.D. is designing a new clinical trial to speed up therapeutic testing for COVID, a national trial studying personalized therapy for women with high-risk early-stage (2-3) breast cancer, or launching a large scale national breast cancer screening and prevention study personalized to a patient’s risk factors, the goal for UCSF’s Alfred A. de Lorimier Endowed Chair in General Surgery is consistent: to improve patient care and outcomes.
Esserman’s groundbreaking work touches on enhancing clinical science and shaping public policy, including her WISDOM Study, which Esserman spoke about at DOC 2024, designed to challenge decisions about cancer screenings.
She returns to DOC 2026 to talk about some of the early findings from the WISDOM 1.0 Breast Cancer Screening Study, which Esserman herself has called “a paradigm shifting trial.” The study, inspired by the work of the University of California’s Athena Breast Health Network, invited almost 50,000 women across the country to participate in a study testing annual screening prevention recommendations, based on their risk factors including population-based genetic testing. The goal was to improve the effectiveness of screening for those at highest risk, and reduce harm for those at lowest risk which includes false positives, bringing “psychological distress.”
Results show that risk-based screening is safe, and actually lowers the rates of stage 2B or higher tumors. The majority of screening rates dropped in alignment with a patient’s risk level — potentially reducing anxiety and stress from unneeded screenings. It’s an outcome Esserman called “very exciting, good for everyone, especially women, but also policy makers.” It is an example where better quality is more affordable.
As the founder and Co-Principal Investigator of the adaptive breast cancer I-SPY trials, Esserman designed a “platform study” to speed up the research and development of therapeutics, with an eye to bringing more personalized treatments to patients more quickly, effectively and tolerably. (Over 35 agents have been tested in the last 15 years.) Their influence is clear: During the pandemic, she received FDA approval to bring the same approach to COVID treatments and now to ARDS.
Esserman also advocates giving patients simple information to support their own care, including how nutrition and exercise can reduce the risk of getting or progressing with cancer. Drawing on her work in immune-driven breast cancer, she’s long encouraged newly diagnosed patients to adopt a high-fiber diet, boosting their intake of foods such as beans and raspberries. Studies are ongoing, but these interventions are east for everyone and may be useful before surgery, to potentially support their immunity.
“Fiber starts that chain of bacteria that give you the kinds of ecosystem that is really healthy for you and stimulates the immune system and the gut,” she said.
For decades, Esserman has advocated for better tools to collect standard information and outcomes on everyone so that we can more rapidly evaluate what we do and how to improve it. More recently, Esserman started to look at AI and how the technology may boost patient data collection. She believes that improving standardization in how data is collected could help researchers and clinicians find “the right treatments, for the right patients, at the right time,” she and her co-author noted.
Esserman is the Founding Director of the RISE UP for Breast Cancer and Women’s Health conference and the Director of the UCSF Breast Care Center. She’s authored more than 450 articles and been awarded numerous honors for her work, including receiving the Susan G. Komen Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in Clinical Research, the Stanford Graduate School of Business Ernest C. Arbuckle Award, and being named Time’s 100 List of Most Influential People in the World. Esserman earned her M.D. from the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she completed her residency and oncology fellowship in general surgery, and received her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
An alumnus of the inaugural DOC 2024, Dr. Esserman is returning to join our DOC 2026 Faculty to update our community about her transformative work. Please join us in welcoming her back.