Kazuaki Takabe, MD, PhD, FACS

Breast cancer is a common disease that one out of eight women in this country will be told they have during their lifetime. Thanks to the advance in breast cancer detection and management, the overall survival has improved up to approximately 90 percent five years after it is found. Yet, we still lose 40,000 women every year in the United States to this disease. This seemingly conflicting fact is not only because there are many breast cancer patients, but also because it can come back 10 or 15 years down the line.

Our mission is to support for the long term survival of breast cancer and enable our patients to live longer and happier. Here at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, breast surgeons, radiologists, medical and radiation oncologists, plastic surgeons, pathologists, and psychologists all work together as a multidisciplinary team to manage your breast cancer. In a vast majority of the cases, breast cancer does not come back at the site we remove it from. Instead, it can show up in the bones, liver, lung, or brain. This is why it is so important that a surgeon — who removes cancer from the breast — and the whole multidisciplinary team need work together to fight breast cancer.

I am a surgical oncologist dedicated to helping breast cancer patients with surgical treatment. I was trained in general surgery at the University of California, San Diego as well as in Japan. After the completion of specialized training in surgical oncology following residency, I continued as an attending surgical oncologist and a faculty member for a decade at the Medical College of Virginia Hospital at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine prior to my arrival to Roswell Park. In my clinical practice, I place a high value in the patient’s satisfaction.

In addition to my extensive surgical career, I was awarded a PhD, followed by postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. I am a Principal Investigator with a laboratory funded by multiple NIH-R01 grants and a Susan G. Komen Foundation grant. With my unique background as a surgeon-scientist, my vision is to translate the latest discoveries from the Roswell Park laboratories to patients whose cancer cannot be controlled by the standard treatments.

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