One in five women will get cancer,
which means 160 women in this room.
As for the others,
you will also be affected, if only indirectly.
This is a tragedy,
but what if it were also part of the solution?
When I became ill,
my sisters, by blood and by heart,
saw to it that I would never go alone to chemotherapy.
They ran errands, cooked, wrote, called,
in short, exerting incredible energy to see me through.
This energy, this need to be useful, to stick together,
is very powerful when you've been hit yourself.
One in five women, plus their sisters by blood or by heart,
add up to a lot of women who have to deal with cancer
and the energy it requires.
Along with them,
we have researchers who do an extraordinary job.
Today, one out of two cancers is cured,
while only one in three was being cured in the '90s.
What is less known is what Dr. Fabien Reyal,
researcher at the M. Curie Institute and my partner, explained to me.
Namely that researchers need us to participate in their studies,
whether we have been ill or not.
In order to find us, they waste precious time.
To get us in the doctor's office, in the waiting rooms,
or look us up in the white pages.
For them, recruiting volunteers
is time consuming, laborious and expensive.
That's why we created "Seintinelles". [Saint-inels]
Specifically, it's a website
where women sign up by giving us their email address,
so that we can inform them
each time a researcher needs volunteers to participate in their study.
We've been online for one year,
and we already have 6,800 women
who've been asked to participate in four studies,
and this is only the beginning.
We are aiming for 50,000 Seintinelles,
as we want to open up to men and other countries
because solidarity and goodwill have no borders.
"Saint-inels" is a play on words, of course,
but it's much more than that.
Cancer is a deadly war.
Alone, we can only win a battle,
but not the war.
To win a war,
we need an army.
In this room, there are 1,600 who could join our army.
You are sixteen hundred more reasons to hope.
Thank you.
(Applause)