A large blue bus covered in the faces of women diagnosed with a little-known type of breast cancer pulled into Pilgrim Memorial State Park on Thursday, concluding a three-week, 3,000-mile journey.
Plymouth resident Laurie Hutcheson was the driving force behind what she called the “beautiful rolling billboard of a bus,” a cross-country effort meant to raise awareness of lobular breast cancer, a difficult-to-detect and understudied disease despite being the second most common type of breast cancer.
“It’s been very moving,” said Hutcheson, the executive director of the nonprofit Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance (LBCA). “People are grateful for us because they’re feeling so alone. It’s just been like finding family everywhere.”
The tour began Sept. 26, after the International Invasive Lobular Carcinoma Symposium in San Francisco. It traveled through 10 states and made 25 stops, including hospitals with dedicated lobular breast cancer programs, research centers, and community events, to hand out informational materials about the disease to the public and clinicians.
Unlike breast cancers that often form in lumps, lobular cancer typically grows in lines, making it harder to detect and sometimes more difficult to remove surgically.
Patients with lobular breast cancer can face barriers to clinical trial participation because their tumors are difficult to measure through imaging, limiting opportunities to study the disease and develop treatments, Hutcheson said.
Researchers have noted that lobular breast cancer is understudied, which the LBCA works to address by raising money for research grants focused on the disease. The organization also runs support groups for patients.
Lobular breast cancer accounts for about 10 to 15 percent of all breast cancers, according to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Hutcheson rode the bus the entire way along with two other representatives of the LBCA, while patients and advocates joined and left parts of the journey.
At the final stop Thursday, Hutcheson was joined by state Reps. Kathy LaNatra and Michelle Badger, along with a representative for state Sen. Dylan Fernandes. LaNatra read a proclamation from Gov. Maura Healey declaring Oct. 15 a statewide awareness day for the disease.
“You’re a true advocate across the country for this cause,” LaNatra told Hutcheson before reading the proclamation, which Healey has made annually since 2024. The state Senate passed a bill Thursday aimed at establishing Oct. 15 as a permanent awareness day.
Before arriving in Plymouth, the bus stopped at Dana-Farber in Boston, one of the first major cancer centers to establish a dedicated program for lobular breast cancer.
“We had to end where my legislators are and in my community,” said Hutcheson, who moved to Plymouth in 2019.
The tour was part of the LBCA’s third annual awareness day and its largest effort yet. Hutcheson said she knew the organization “had to go bigger” this year after an LBCA survey found that four in five Americans had never heard of lobular breast cancer and that most patients diagnosed with the disease did not receive sufficient information about it.
“Why not drive a bus cross-country wrapped in messages about lobular breast cancer and the images of women who have had or have passed away from it?” she said, adding that the idea took shape after she followed a group of Theravada Buddhist monks who completed a 2,300-mile “Walk for Peace” across the United States earlier this year.
When Hutcheson was diagnosed with lobular breast cancer in 2018, she didn’t know there were different types of breast cancer, much less what a lobular diagnosis meant. Even her clinical team had little information, she said.
“You feel really alone when you’ve got a cancer diagnosis, and then they tell you nothing’s known about it,” she said.
After finding the LBCA through a Google search, Hutcheson began extensively volunteering for the organization, a small grassroots group at the time. She became its executive director in 2020 and helped establish it as an independent nonprofit two years later.
“It was a combination of the fear and anger and my own personal curiosity,” she said of her motivation to get involved. “I just got caught up in the need for lobular breast cancer to be known and realized that the best way is engaging the patients who, like me, were angry that not enough advancement has been made.”
While the organization has been focused on national organizing over the past several years, Hutcheson said she wants to bring more local events to the Plymouth-Boston area.
“That’s probably my next project,” she said.
Emily Spatz can be reached at emily@plymouthindependent.org.