Blue Matter Partners, Milena Sullivan, Mary Roberts, and Tara Austraat-Churik will be attending and speaking at the 2026 meeting of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care (AVBCC) in New York, October 7-9, 2026.

Panels:

Wednesday, Oct 7 at 8:00 am > Key Opinion Leader Session 4, Olympic Suite 5, 10th Floor:

How Oncology Became the “Unprotected Class” and Will It Remain?

Oncology has long held privileged status as one of Medicare Part D’s six protected classes, but that protection is now under quiet siege. With 9 key cancer agents already affected by negotiation and more to come, CMS is forcing price erosion and bending formulary dynamics in key tumors. Part D benefit redesign and PBM reform are fundamentally altering payer incentives. CMMI proposed MFN models explicitly target protected classes. This panel will debate a hard question: Is oncology still a protected class in a meaningful sense, and what does the next wave of access barriers look like for patients, prescribers, and manufacturers?

Milena Sullivan (Moderator)

 

Wednesday, Oct 7 at 8:00 am > Key Opinion Leader Session 2, Presidents, 10th Floor:

State of the Patient: How Are We Really Doing?

Precision medicine and innovation have never moved faster — but for many patients, the promise of that innovation still doesn’t reach their daily lives. This session takes a state-of-the-union look at where patients really stand today: what’s improving, what’s still broken, and what it will take to pair scientific progress with “precision care” — access, affordability, and the practical necessities of living with cancer. We’ll hear directly from leaders in the advocacy space about where innovation is genuinely changing lives, where the system is still failing patients, and what patient-centered models already in motion — including cross-sector efforts like Pfizer’s Patient Advocacy 360 — can teach the broader field about building innovation around the patient rather than around the system.

Mary Roberts (Panelist)

 

Wednesday, Oct 7 at 5:00 pm > Key Opinion Leader Session 33, Lounge, 9th Floor:

US vs. China, Preserving Our National Treasure: Clinical Research

China has pursued global leadership in biotechnology for many years and has made tremendous headway in the past decade. Although the US has historically retained a leg up in drug discovery, it’s losing ground to China in manufacturing and clinical trials. In 2021, China’s global share of Phase 1 trials surpassed the United States’ share for the first time. In 2024, China surpassed the United States in the total number of clinical trials registered, with 39 percent of global trials. China’s goal is nothing less than manufacturing dominance, and much of the world’s advanced-stage manufacturing supply-chain infrastructure is now China based. This panel will explore what can be done to protect America clinical research and barriers we need to address and what solutions we have the power to implement.

Tara Austraat-Churik (Panelist)

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