Mission
TNBC research output has grown from roughly 200 papers per year in 2007 to well over 3,000 per year by 2024. Patient-facing material has not kept up. Authoritative summaries (NCI, ACS, NCCN) are accurate but updated infrequently and rarely link to the underlying papers. Faster sources are often unreliable or ungrounded. Primary literature is comprehensive but inaccessible without professional skills.
TNBC Atlas exists to close that gap. We publish synthesized, citation-grounded summaries in two layers — one for patients and families, one for researchers and clinicians — built on top of a structured bibliography of essentially every peer-reviewed TNBC paper. Same evidence base, two reading altitudes, refreshed weekly.
We are information infrastructure, not a clinical decision tool. Nothing on this site replaces a conversation with an oncologist. We aim to be the highest-signal, lowest-friction starting point for anyone trying to understand the current state of TNBC science.
How we’re organized
The project runs three integrated tracks (see the methods page for the bibliography pipeline and the changelog for editorial history):
- Bibliography pipeline — weekly harvest from PubMed, Europe PMC, OpenAlex, Crossref, Unpaywall, and Retraction Watch, all free public sources.
- Synthesis writing — topic pages drafted in both audience layers, with mandatory expert review and (for patient-layer pages) patient-advocate review before publication.
- Web platform — this site, hosted on Cloudflare, source-available, designed to be fast and accessible on a phone over slow internet.
Editorial standards
All synthesis content must cite primary literature inline. No claim about efficacy, mechanism, or outcome stands without a tagged citation pointing into the bibliography. Public-layer content additionally requires patient-advocate read-through and a plain-language readability check (Hemingway grade ≤ 10, defined glossary terms hyperlinked on first use). The full editorial workflow, evidence grading scale (GRADE-adapted), and review gates are documented in the project’s Phase 2 plan.
Every published page carries a version number, a "last reviewed" date, and a list of the writer, reviewer, and editorial PI who signed off. Earlier versions remain accessible by permalink; corrections appear in the errata and changelog.
Conflict-of-interest policy
Every contributor — editorial board member, writer, reviewer, advocate, engineer — discloses all financial and advisory relationships (industry consulting, advisory boards, speakers’ bureaus, equity holdings, research funding) at the time they join the project and updates the disclosure annually. Disclosures will be published on the contributors page once the board is constituted.
Industry-funded contributors do not have final sign-off authority on content related to their funder’s products. If a contributor has a financial relationship with the manufacturer of pembrolizumab, for example, they are recused from editorial sign-off on the KEYNOTE-522 / KEYNOTE-355 sections of any synthesis page. They may still contribute to the underlying writing; the sign-off goes to a different reviewer.
Funding
TNBC Atlas was founded and is supported by the Jennifer T. Strickland Foundation. The Foundation provided the seed funding, the editorial mandate, and the operational support that made this project possible. Without that backing the work described elsewhere on this site would not exist.
TNBC Atlas is not funded by any commercial entity. Infrastructure (Cloudflare Pages, a managed PostgreSQL instance, search indexing, monitoring) is a modest cost; editorial and engineering labor is the dominant cost category and is supported by the Foundation plus ongoing pro-bono contributions.
We do not accept pharmaceutical-company sponsorship for content related to that company’s products. General unrestricted philanthropic funding — from the Jennifer T. Strickland Foundation, other foundations, public-health institutions, or individual donors not tied to a specific drug or device — is the funding model. Additional funding sources, as they arise, will be publicly listed here.
Licensing
All synthesis content on this site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license — you may copy, share, adapt, and build on it, including commercially, as long as you give credit and link back to the original.
The bibliography metadata corpus is also CC BY 4.0; bulk exports and a public REST API are planned for a future release. The site code is open source and available in the project repository.
Note: while our written content is CC BY 4.0, abstracts and full-text content of cited papers remain copyright their publishers. We link out to those rather than redistributing them.
Contributing
If you would like to contribute — as a writer, reviewer, patient advocate, translator, engineer, or simply by reporting an error — we want to hear from you. Email contributors@tnbc.info with a brief description of how you’d like to help and any relevant background. All contributors complete the conflict-of-interest disclosure described above before substantive participation.
For corrections to specific pages, see the errata process. For accessibility issues, see the accessibility statement.
What we are not
Worth saying explicitly:
- We are not a substitute for your oncology team. Decisions about your treatment are made between you and your clinicians.
- We are not a clinical decision-support tool. There is no calculator, no decision tree, no personalized recommendation engine here, and there will not be one.
- We are not a fundraising platform, a treatment-finder service, or a referral network.
- We are not affiliated with any pharmaceutical company, hospital system, or government agency.
- We are not an emergency resource. If you are in a medical emergency, call your local emergency number.
- We are not a mental-health crisis line. If you are in crisis, please reach out to a local crisis service or talk to your care team.
Acknowledgments
This work builds on decades of patient advocacy, clinical-trial leadership, and basic-science research. We owe particular intellectual debt to the editors and authors of the foundational TNBC reviews (Foulkes / Smith / Reis-Filho 2010; Bianchini and colleagues 2016 and 2022) and to the bibliometric work that informed our tier-1 curation. None of those individuals are affiliated with this project; the acknowledgment is for the influence of their work on how we have organized ours.
How to contact us
- General questions: hello@tnbc.info
- Corrections / errata: errata@tnbc.info (see the errata process)
- Accessibility issues: accessibility@tnbc.info (see the accessibility statement)
- Privacy / security: privacy@tnbc.info (see the privacy policy)
- Contributors: contributors@tnbc.info
These addresses are monitored; we aim to reply within a few business days.
Last reviewed: 2026-07-10. Governance and editorial structure are subject to change as the project matures. Material changes will be recorded in the errata and changelog.