When you talk with Virginia Borges, MD, MMsc, about her work in caring for women with breast cancer, you’re struck by how often she uses the word “our” in speaking of her patients. For example, she says her clinical mission is “to improve the care delivered and the outcomes for our young women.”
It’s a tendency that was noted when Borges was inducted as one of 21 University of Colorado Department of Medicine faculty members in the inaugural class of the department’s Clinical Excellence Society (CES), recognized as champions for their patients.
“'Our' is a critical word here,” Sunita Sharma, MD, the department’s vice chair for faculty development and mentorship, said during the induction ceremony. “Dr. Borges recognizes all her patients – those who might be millionaires or those who do not have home security – as ours. Our community members.”
Or as Borges puts it: “It is of paramount importance to me that my patients are on an equal playing field for the opportunity to receive care, regardless of who they are or where they are in life.”
→ More profiles of Clinical Excellence Society inductees
A physician first and foremost
Borges is a professor and deputy head of the department’s Division of Medical Oncology, a CU Cancer Center leader, and a physician at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital since 2003. She’s esteemed internationally as a researcher and as a mentor to many colleagues.
She calls CES recognition of her clinical work “a huge honor. To be recognized by my peers for being good at what I do gives you chills down your spine.”
She adds: “Being a physician is, first and foremost, the reason I come to work every day. I am here to help my patients, guide my patients when possible, and cure my patients, or at least prolong their lives and offer them a good quality of life for as long as scientifically and humanly possible. That takes precedence over everything else I do in my job.”
Both in her research and in the clinic, Borges’ focus is young women with breast cancer.
“It’s a pretty challenging patient population,” she says. “It’s hard to see young women with breast cancer not do well. Once upon a time, I was even younger or the same age as my patients. Now I'm older, and I never lose gratitude for the fact that I have gotten to get to this age and raise my children and be healthy when I have witnessed many, many women who never got that chance.”
→ Despite Advances, Breast Cancer Remains the Number 1 Cancer Among Women
Drawn to medicine
Borges is the youngest of five children, and one of four who went into medicine. Her eldest brother was in medical school by the time she was 4 and became a neurosurgeon, and her eldest sister went into nursing school not long after. Another sister is a pediatrician.
“One of the earliest words I could say was ‘hop-ital,’ and I thought everybody got a stethoscope when they grew up,” she says. “I have wanted to be a doctor my entire life, probably because of that exposure around the dining room table just listening to my siblings.”
When Borges was 10, her eldest sister passed away from complications of her treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma. “It really devastated my family. When I went to medical school, the last thing I wanted to read about was cancer.”
Then came Borges’ second year of internal medicine residency at Deaconess Hospital in Boston, which had a strong medical oncology program. “I was rotating on the service where our cancer patients were taken care of, and I had a phenomenal mentor, Dr. Keith Stuart. I felt such a connection with those patients, and it felt so meaningful to take care of them.” She chose to pursue oncology, “and I’ve never looked back.”
A drug without a name
Later, as a clinical fellow in oncology at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, “there weren’t a whole lot of women doctors, so I ended up seeing a lot of the breast cancer patients, and I kind of fell in love with them.”
She helped run clinical trials for potential breast cancer treatments. “One of those trials was for a drug that didn’t have a name for a gene that nobody had heard of,” she says. The gene is now known as HER2, a major focus of Borges’ research work, and the drug is now known as Herceptin.
During that trial, “I met two women with breast cancer the same week. One qualified for the trial, and one did not. The one who did not died within months. The one who did is alive today.”
She adds: “That was an amazing outcome showing that when you get the right drug to hit the right target, you can potentially cure someone of an incurable disease. That happened to the first patient I ever put on a clinical trial. That’s what got me hooked on breast cancer, and especially young women’s breast cancer, because both of those patients were a couple of years older than me, and I was about 27 at the time.”
Laughing with her patients
In her letter in support of Borges’ CES induction, medical oncologist Marie Wood, MD, medical director of the CU Cancer Center’s Cancer Clinical Trials Office, wrote: “Occasionally I am in clinic when she is and hear her laughing with her patients. It is a rare oncologist who can do this.” Wood added: “She is someone I would want as my physician should the need arise.”
Borges is passionate about advocating for patients to have equal access to care.
“Breast cancer does not equally affect all women,” she says. “Women of different racial backgrounds can have different outcomes. But at the end of the day, they’re all women who need help from us. No matter who walks through that door, no matter how under-resourced they are, whether they speak English or not, they all must have an equal opportunity to get the best care we can offer them, whether we can cure them or not. There is no clinical system that is immune to these issues of equal access, even one as fine as ours that makes it a priority to try to level the playing field.”
Photo at top: Virginia Borges, MD, MMsc, is inducted into the CU Department of Medicine's Clinical Excellence Society by department Chair Vineet Chopra, MD, MSc (left) and John Carethers, MD, vice chancellor for health sciences at the University of California, San Diego, at a ceremony on February 8, 2024. Photo by Paul Wedlake for the CU Department of Medicine.
