Breast Cancer UK’s Breast Cancer Prevention Conference: key themes and highlights
Breast Cancer UK’s second Breast Cancer Prevention Conference recently took place at Middlesex University (London, UK) on the 10–11 June 2025. This meeting brought together nearly 100 individuals including academics, researchers, clinicians, nurses, students and charity members with an interest in breast cancer prevention.
This truly international conference featured delegates and speakers from across the UK and around the world including the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Myanmar and mainland Europe, highlighting the growing global commitment to advancing research and collaboration in breast cancer prevention.
Conference key themes and objectives
Breast Cancer UK is an independent prevention charity dedicated to empowering people to reduce their risk of breast cancer. As leaders in public education on risk factors and pioneers in environmental chemical prevention research, they are committed to driving forward change through knowledge, collaboration and innovation.
The 2025 conference is a follow-up to the highly rated inaugural two-day event in 2023. This year, they’ve taken an integrated approach, weaving environmental, lifestyle and intrinsic risk factor research throughout both days. The popular poster flash talks also returned, providing early career researchers in particular a dynamic platform to showcase their research.
The key objectives of the conference were to unite like-minded individuals with a shared interest in breast cancer prevention to discuss the latest research, foster meaningful collaborations, build new research networks and identify current research gaps or areas of unmet need. Highlights from the conference are outlined below.
Keynote speakers
Each day began with a plenary lecture from a leading expert in the field of environmental chemicals (Day 1) and lifestyle (Day 2) breast cancer risk factors.
On day one, Jennifer Kay (Silent Spring Institute, MA, USA) opened the conference with her keynote lecture entitled ‘Using the key characteristics framework to identify potential breast carcinogens’.
Kay delivered a detailed and insightful overview on identifying breast carcinogens using publicly available datasets using set criteria or key characteristics of breast carcinogenesis. She highlighted the importance of using this information not only to inform the public about potential health risks but also to support chemical risk assessment, regulatory decisions and exposure monitoring.
Day 2 was opened by Marc Gunter (Imperial College London, UK), who gave an expert overview on the ability to identify novel risk factors for breast cancer using population-based cohorts. His talk included a comprehensive analysis of circulating biomarkers for breast cancer risk, where currently, convincing evidence only exists for a few hormones.
Gunter proceeded to discuss how applying omics approaches, including metabolomics and proteomics, to population-based cohorts could help identify further novel biomarkers for breast cancer. These could potentially serve as early detection indicators or targets for prevention.
Intrinsic risk: A spotlight on male breast cancer
A new addition to the 2025 program was the Intrinsic Risk Factors session, which included an insightful presentation by Nick Orr (Queen’s University Belfast, UK) on the genetics of male breast cancer – a significantly understudied cancer compared to its female counterpart. Orr demonstrated the significant role of specific inherited gene mutations and reiterated the need for more refined risk stratification models tailored to men.
Stress, the Breast Cancer Now Generations Study and the importance of movement
A popular request from the 2023 conference was how stress is related to breast cancer risk, a topic that has historically drawn inconsistent conclusions on its relationship with breast cancer. Yahya Mahamat-Saleh (International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France) presented findings from his latest research into the role of stress and breast cancer risk using a population-based cohort method. Using this approach, he identified a positive correlation between the body’s primary stress hormone cortisol and breast cancer risk.
Other highlights within the lifestyle sessions included Darryl Edwards (Primal Play, UK) engaging and unique perspective on the benefits of physical activity for cancer prevention, which even featured a movement break to get everyone up on their feet and exercising!
Additionally, Michael Jones (Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK) provided an update on the Breast Cancer Now Generations Study. This landmark project, which has now reached its 20-year halfway point, tracks over 100,000 women and collects vast amounts of information related to several breast cancer risk factors. The study is due to continue for a further two decades, in the hope of informing more effective breast cancer prevention strategies.
What about environmental chemicals?
Environmental chemical exposure remains a central focus for Breast Cancer UK, and this year’s conference continued to spotlight the latest research in this area.
Barbara Cohn (Public Health Institute, CA, USA) presented her latest work on multigenerational environmental risk for breast cancer, suggesting that breast cancer risk may be influenced by chemical exposures experienced by grandparents and highlighting the importance of the paternal line. This highlighted the need to consider broader, transgenerational effects when assessing risk when it comes to chemical exposure.
The penultimate session of the conference was focused on chemical evaluation and regulation. Presentations included two innovative human-relevant models for assessing breast and dermal chemical exposure, and Olwenn Martin (University College London, UK) provided an insightful talk on the complexities of regulating chemical mixtures and stressed the importance of developing robust frameworks for evaluating combined exposures, which provided an excellent lead into the final session of the event.
Panel discussion: From science to policy
The conference concluded with an interactive panel discussion on the translation of scientific research into meaningful policy change. The expert panel, consisting of Jennifer Kay, Olwenn Martin, Stuart Harrad (University of Birmingham, UK) and Chloe Topping (CHEMTrust) were invited to share their views on the current landscape regarding chemical regulation and policy.
Audience members engaged in a lively and informative dialogue with the panel, with several topics explored, including:
- Why current policy often lags behind scientific evidence on chemical risks
- How researchers and advocates can effectively influence policy change
- Whether advocating for a reduction in pesticide usage could impact food production and security
- The need for improved education for medical professionals on environmental exposures for those who wish to better advise patients
This session stood out as a highlight of the conference, marked by dynamic discussion and valuable insights from both panellists and attendees.
Breast Cancer UK’s Breast Cancer Prevention Conference: A unique focus on prevention
As an event dedicated entirely to the prevention of breast cancer, Breast Cancer UK’s Breast Cancer Prevention Conference offers a unique and valuable platform for knowledge exchange. It explores the underlying mechanisms through which environmental, lifestyle and intrinsic factors contribute to breast cancer risk, shining a spotlight on areas often underrepresented in cancer research and events.
A key takeaway from the conference was the growing interest in breast cancer prevention across multiple sectors. Delegates from the NHS, academia, NGOs and health and wellness fields came together, unified by a shared commitment to prevention. There was a clear enthusiasm for engaging with the latest research developments and translating these insights into both new and ongoing projects.
Notably, NHS professionals expressed strong interest in how prevention research and findings can be applied within the clinical environment to help educate patients on breast cancer risk reduction. This highlights an important shift: prevention is currently in the spotlight more than ever before, and the expressed willingness of some NHS professionals to translate prevention science to patients in the clinical setting is an important step forward.
A final, but important note was the consensus that there needs to be more collaboration, both between sectors and within them. It’s our hope that this event served as a springboard for knowledge exchange and innovation, helping to foster new partnerships and inspire research initiatives aimed at better understanding and ultimately reducing breast cancer risk.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oncology Central or Taylor & Francis Group.