For years, healthcare leaders kept reaching for the same answer: another molecule, another trial, another breakthrough. Researchers kept moving the science. Patients still ran into fragmented data, limited trial access, care inequities, and weak collaboration across the organizations responsible for turning discovery into care.
Theresa’s Research Foundation put that problem in writing. Its 2026 MBC DART strategic action plan brought together researchers, clinicians, patient advocates, industry leaders, and nonprofit organizations. The plan delivers a message healthcare leaders can no longer dodge. Structural barriers now rank among the greatest obstacles to progress in metastatic breast cancer.
A fragmented system does not appear by accident. Leaders design reporting lines. Companies assign budgets. Sponsors choose who enters protocol development. When advocacy sits inside one function and everybody else treats it like a community-relations desk, insight dies in the handoff.
Archo’s 2024 BIOADVOCATE Benchmark shows how fragile the operating model can become. Among surveyed organizations, 75 percent reported annual revenue above $1 billion, yet 50 percent ran patient advocacy teams with only one to five people. Only 17 percent reported teams of 26 to 50 people.
ELAVAY’s 2025 data shows exactly where advocacy organizations feel the gap. Across 131 respondents, organizations rated their interest in coalition support at 5.86 and current industry support at 4.36. That creates a 1.50-point gap. Advocacy organizations want more than a sponsorship check and a logo on a conference slide. They want shared infrastructure, coordinated research, patient access support, and a working relationship that survives the photo opportunity.
MBC DART gives the industry a clean test. Will companies fund interoperable data, modernized trial models, patient-centered evidence, equity-focused access initiatives, and cross-sector workstreams? Or will they fund another roundtable where twelve leaders agree that collaboration matters and nobody leaves with an owner, a budget, or a deadline?
Give advocacy a seat before teams lock the protocol, access strategy, and commercial plan.
Set cross-functional decision rights.
Build one shared patient-insight repository.
Name an executive owner for every barrier that crosses functions.
Tie budget to outcomes that patients and advocacy partners can see.
Originally published in The Archo Advocate Brief.
