MARP 2023: Melissa and Michael
Melissa Davis, Advocate and Michael Papanicolaou, Researcher
My name is Melissa Davis and I’m a 40-year-old single parent of three boys with Stage 4 Her2 breast cancer.
Every day, I wake up grateful that I’m able to see my children again. But I’ve grown tired of the disparities that persist in the healthcare system. African American women are dying of breast cancer at an alarming rate. I’ve seen countless women unsure if they will live for another two months or two years – but we want to live.
As an African American woman, I would like to see more research done on the risk factors of and implications associated with breast cancer among marginalized communities. At the Metastatic Breast Cancer Research Conference in Park City, Utah, I got the opportunity to meet with several researchers who are doing just that. Many, for example, spoke to how far we’ve come in addressing Her2 breast cancer. One researcher, Dr. Melissa Davis (coincidentally we share the same name), is exploring the disproportionate impact of Triple Negative breast cancer on women of African descent. This research gives me hope that there are sound, safe, and effective solutions for treating breast cancer, and even potentially preventing it.
At the conference, women like me who are living with metastatic breast cancer, and who are patient advocates for improving breast cancer research, were given the opportunity to meet with researchers to share our stories. Patient advocates work to ensure that research remains targeted and relevant to a patient’s lived experience – for example, we discuss the differences of how therapies might be used in lab experiments compared to the clinic environment. During this meeting, I met with researcher Michael Papanicolaou, who is currently doing his research on why metastatic breast cancer cells undergo a period of dormancy before they grow and how to ensure that they remain dormant. Michael works in the Bronx, New York, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and he shared with me about the research many of his colleagues are doing on cancer among marginalized communities. I shared with him the timeline of my disease progression and how it has manifested in different periods of my life. He took away from the conversation, he said, just how important community is in the face of disease, both within the patient advocacy community and my own personal community that has stood behind me through my cancer experience. Cancer does not affect just one person, but their entire world.
Michael and I have plans to come together and meet in the laboratory in the nearby future. We’re both excited about working together and even potentially gaining funding for this important area of research. I pray he can contribute to clinical trials that can consider how to maintain dormancy of cancer cells in the long-term. I also have high hopes for myself in the cancer space. One day, I’d love to launch my own organization that can help patients like me gain access to the resources they need, be it emotional, financial, or advocacy support. We all have an important role to play in addressing breast cancer, and it’s important that we continue to work together as teams – as a community – to ensure that no one has to fight this disease, much less do it alone.
