Every October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month puts screening and early detection in the spotlight. This year there’s a second story underneath it. Since December 2025, the FDA has approved 12 new breast cancer drugs and indications, more new therapy in under a year than most physicians can absorb on their own.
Every approval opens an education gap. Physicians have to learn which patients qualify, how a new drug fits with the ones they already use, and how to manage its side effects. And that learning can’t stop at the oncologist. About 322,000 American women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer this year, and their care runs through family physicians, internists, OB-GYNs and radiologists as well as surgeons and oncologists.
On Vumedi, more than 640,000 healthcare professionals share expertise through video, podcasts and community. So far this year, over 13,000 physicians from more than 30 specialties have watched breast cancer content on Vumedi, starting videos 48,740 times.
Here’s what we’re seeing as they work through breast cancer’s busiest year, and what it means for anyone helping physicians keep up.
Since December 2025, the FDA has approved 12 new breast cancer drugs and indications, and six of them are antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Together they reach every major subtype: HER2-positive, triple-negative and hormone receptor-positive disease.
We’ve been watching how oncologists talk about these drugs. Using AskMedi, our AI-powered clinical intelligence tool, we analyzed more than 18 months of physician-to-physician discussion on Vumedi about ADCs in breast cancer. The question has moved from “do ADCs work?” to “which ADC, when, and how do we keep patients safely on treatment?” Three shifts stand out.
What this means for education: When there’s no head-to-head trial or validated biomarker to settle a question, physicians learn from the colleagues already using these drugs. Peer-to-peer education fills that gap long before guidelines catch up.
On Vumedi, oral SERDs and endocrine therapy drew the most viewing of any breast cancer topic this past quarter, followed by ADCs. Viewing across most topics dipped after the summer conference season, but the number of physicians watching oral SERD content held steady.
A breast cancer therapy doesn’t only reach oncologists. Patients pass through primary care and women’s health before they’re diagnosed, and they keep seeing those physicians throughout treatment.
Screening and dense breasts. Screening now starts at 40 under the USPSTF’s 2024 update, and since September 2024 every mammography report tells patients whether their breasts are dense and that dense tissue can hide cancer. What to do next is still unsettled: the USPSTF finds the evidence insufficient for supplemental imaging, while the American College of Radiology recommends MRI for some women. At Vumedi Week 2026, Dr. Romuald Ferre walked through an ASCO/ACR decision tree for choosing supplemental MRI or contrast-enhanced mammography, a question for the radiologist and for the primary care physician or OB-GYN deciding what to order.
Risk and prevention. About 1 in 8 American women will develop breast cancer, and incidence in women under 50 is rising about 1.4% a year. The ACR recommends a risk assessment by age 25, and the USPSTF recommends offering risk-reducing medication to women at increased risk. Those decisions sit with family physicians, internists and OB-GYNs. On Vumedi, genetics and BRCA was the only breast cancer topic to grow from the second quarter to the third, with video starts up 30%.
Co-managing patients during treatment. While a patient is on an ADC or years of endocrine therapy, her primary care physician or gynecologist is still prescribing for other conditions and fielding new symptoms, such as a cough that could signal interstitial lung disease. Dr. Makeba Williams’ Vumedi session on nonhormonal and local estrogen strategies for breast cancer survivors is the kind of guidance an OB-GYN needs when a patient on endocrine therapy asks for relief from hot flashes.
What this means for education: A new therapy needs an education plan that reaches the physicians who screen, refer and co-manage, not only the ones who prescribe it.
Oncologists are the most engaged audience by far. Hematology-oncology physicians start about 10 breast cancer videos each, more than six times as many as primary care physicians, and account for about two-thirds of all viewing. But they aren’t the only ones watching. Vumedi’s internists and family physician audiences are the largest group of viewers, at 45%, followed by hematology-oncology at 24% and cardiology at 12%. The cardiology audience reflects how often breast cancer care now crosses into heart health, from monitoring cardiac function on HER2-targeted therapy to managing cardiovascular risk on long-term endocrine therapy. In all, more than three-quarters of the physicians watching breast cancer content aren’t oncologists, even though most of it is still made with oncologists in mind.
Breast cancer treatment is advancing faster than ever, and so is what it asks of the clinicians caring for patients. From the first mammogram at 40 to the choice between two ADCs, physicians across specialties are making decisions where the evidence is still moving.
As Vumedi Chief Content Officer Jo-Ann Strangis puts it: "The goal is to get the latest medical advances into patient care as quickly and thoughtfully as possible." That happens fastest when physicians learn directly from each other.