Zero Breast Cancer
Zero Breast Cancer (ZBC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to finding the causes of breast cancer through community participation in the research process. They focus on identifying environmental factors and the role they play in the development of breast cancer at all stages of life and across generations.
Zero Breast Cancer leads the Community Outreach and Translation Core of the for NIEHS funded Bay Area Breast Cancer and Environment Research Center (BABCERC). BABCERC is one of four centers nationwide that studies the environmental causes of breast cancer by focusing on mammary gland development during puberty when the breast may be especially vulnerable to environmental influences. The Center is based at the University of California San Francisco under the leadership of Dr. Robert A. Hiatt, Director of Population Sciences, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. The Center includes a basic science project that studies mammary cells in normal and cancer-prone mice; an epidemiologic study, CYGNET, that is following a cohort of 444 6- to 7-year old girls prospectively for five years through the pubertal transition; and a Community Outreach and Translation Core (COTC) to represent the concerns of the advocate community and provide a channel for bi-directional communication between scientists and the community. Additionally, ZBC has pioneered a peer education program for adolescents that has received national attention.
Janna has done a series of projects for Zero Breast Cancer including:
~providing project management to the CYGNET team to develop the procedures and materials to report back individual level biomarker results to study participant parent/guardians;
~evaluating CYGNET study Tea Talks including revising the evaluation form, analyzing the data, and preparing a written report;
~writing conference proceedings of the Breast Cancer and Prevention Community Education Forum for Younger Women; and
~synthesizing 4 years of evaluation data and participant input from the ZBC peer education program and from BABCERC programs.