Breast Cancer – Receptors

Transcript

So receptors are little protein signals on the outside of the breast cancer. And what they do is they send a signal down through that cell, which allows the cancer to grow and generally grow more quickly based on that signal. So the main receptors that breast cancer cells can have is your hormone receptors, which are estrogen and progesterone. And then the other class that you have is HER2 receptors. So hormone receptors are found on normal breast tissue, and this is the way that women’s breasts grow during different parts of their life, during puberty and then when they’re having children and all those things, and that’s normal. And certain breast cancers kind of override that system and allow themselves to grow with the use of those hormones. So a main part of the treatment of that is blocking the hormones. So that’s a very important distinction in oncology dealing with breast cancer. And that’s one of the main things that your medical oncologist going to say to you. It’s hormone positive or it’s hormone negative.