Ideas to Implementation (I2I)

Submit Your Proposal for the Ideas to Implementation Competition here by January 5th, 2026

Before you can make a submission, you will be prompted to log in or set up an account with Oxford Abstracts.

The Ideas to Implementation competition will take place on the first day of RISE UP, on February 19th, 2026. The day begins with the I2I Pitch Competition at Feinstein’s Hotel Nikko, where innovators showcase their ventures to a panel of judges and investors. Following this, a featured session, Re-Imagine Toxicity and Reducing Drug Manufacturing Costs: A Call to Action to VCs, challenges stakeholders to rethink industry practices and funding priorities. The competition concludes with closing remarks from I2I, with competition results to be announced on Saturday.

What is the Ideas to Implementation Competition? 

Significant strides have been made in understanding that the biology of breast cancer is not homogenous, leading to dramatic advances in treatment. Yet despite this progress, the incidence of breast cancer continues to rise. We need to dramatically reshape how we approach the prevention of breast cancer. There is a profound opportunity to affect this trend–one that requires an out-of-the-box approach and a paradigm shift in prevention.

Breast cancer risk starts early, with factors such as the timing of menarche influenced by exercise and diet, and it continues across a woman’s lifetime through hormonal exposures including birth control, fertility treatments, postpartum weaning, and menopause management. For example, nearly 65% of women ages 15–49 use some form of contraception, yet most were formulated before we fully understood breast cancer risk. Pharmaceutical products are often designed for a single purpose, but we have not leveraged their potential to serve multiple goals; for example, contraceptives that can also reduce breast cancer risk or medications that can treat fibroids and reduce breast cancer.

The RISE UP (Revolutionizing Investigations to StEp Up Prevention) interdisciplinary meeting is designed to spark this paradigm shift: to rethink, reformulate, and reimagine the products widely used in women’s health such that they also integrate cancer prevention. 

The RISE UP “Ideas to Implementation” session bridges academia and venture capital, inviting all sectors–researchers, providers, policymakers, and industry–to develop bold, practical strategies that embed prevention into the standard of care.

This competition is explicitly designed to harness innovation and frontier-breaking solutions that reduce disparities, optimize women’s health, and dramatically decrease the incidence, morbidity, and mortality from breast cancer.

What are we looking for?

• Prevention across the lifecourse: Ideas that leverage what we know about breast cancer biology, treatment, and hormonal management as a baseline to expand and reimagine how we approach breast cancer prevention across a woman’s lifecourse
• Biomarker-driven prevention tools: Risk assessment tools that utilize blood, tissue or imaging biomarkers or products to better understand risk and response are of particular interest as well. 
• Dual-impact therapeutics: Exploration of medications or biologic pathways that not only mitigate specific conditions but also lower breast cancer risk or delay disease progression.

Where does my idea best fit in this competition?

There are two branches of this competition. The SPARK award and the Implementation award. 
The “SPARK” award aims to foster early-stage research ideas and collaborations. Interested parties should submit a proposal that outlines their idea, addresses how it is innovative and considers a holistic approach to breast cancer prevention. The most promising proposals will be selected to prepare a more detailed pitch deck, and finalists will be invited to present their ideas live in front of an outstanding panel of judges at the RISE UP for Breast Cancer meeting to be held in San Francisco, CA from February 19-21st, 2026. 
SPARK awards will focus on transformative early-stage research efforts and/or collaborations to create a new program and approach. Selected awardees will receive an award of up to $50k.
    The Implementation Award supports seed-stage innovations by lowering barriers to commercialization and encouraging venture and industry investment in prevention. Finalists will present poster proposals and a subset will be invited to an in-person “Shark Tank”-style pitch session at the RISE UP for Breast Cancer Conference on February 19, 2026. Pitches will be judged by investors, FDA leaders, scientists, advocates, and community leaders on feasibility and potential impact. Winners will have the opportunity to work with clinical partners within the RISE UP ecosystem identified at the conference to test their ideas in the clinic.

Follow this flowchart to assess which branch of the competition best suits your idea!

Examples from last year's winners & concepts we would be particularly interested in having further submissions in

• Contraceptives have been associated with decreases in ovarian and colon cancer, but not yet with decreases in breast cancer. What if we could redesign contraceptives to reduce breast cancer risk as well? 
• Testing a small implant that combines testosterone with an aromatase inhibitor to rebalance hormones in breast tissue. This study, using advanced imaging/omics, hopes to lower the risk of ER+ and ER- breast cancers by changing the local environment in the breast to provide a safe, effective prevention option. 
• An app, FitnessCan, that gives personalized exercise programs for cancer patients to help them safely regain strength, reduce fatigue, and improve recovery after treatment. 
• Utilizing new FDA-approved weight loss drugs (incretin mimetics) to reduce breast cancer risk. By identifying biomarkers that predict which patients will benefit , this project aims to personalize medication recommendations and reduce the risk of developing cancer for women with obesity. 
• Exploring the use of mifepristone (a progesterone blocker) for breast cancer prevention and developing epigenetic tests that track early cancer risk changes in breast tissue or even in self-collected samples. The combination of preventive drugs and real-time risk monitoring could personalize prevention strategies for high-risk women.
• Black women are diagnosed with fibroids roughly three times as frequently as white women. Anti-progestins, such as ulipristal acetate (UPA), have been shown to reduce symptomatic fibroids. As anti-progestins have been independently associated with the reduction of breast cancer risk, this presents an exciting, underexplored opportunity: could a single class of agents be harnessed to address both fibroids and breast cancer risk?
• Exploring new biomarkers that predict breast cancer risk and response that could better accelerate breast cancer prevention trials. 
• New risk assessment tools that could better predict who is at risk for different types of breast cancer.

Submit Your Proposal for the Ideas to Implementation Competition here by January 5th, 2025

Before you can make a submission, you will be prompted to log in or set up an account with Oxford Abstracts.