What Are Receptors?

Transcript

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. The main receptors that breast cancer cells can have are your hormone receptors, which are estrogen and progesterone. And then the other class that you have is HER2 receptors.

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.

That’s a very important distinction in oncology dealing with breast cancer. And that’s one of the main things that your medical oncologist is going to say to you. It’s hormone positive or it’s hormone negative.

So the other receptor that breast cancer cells can have is something called HER2. And HER2 is simply just another receptor, another protein, that’s on the outside of some breast cancer cells, that again, helps that breast cancer grow through signals down through the cancer cell. This again is very important because traditionally, these cancers tended to be more aggressive and sometimes happen in younger patients as well. Now it’s very important for us to know this because we have very good treatments to target that HER2 receptor on the outside of the breast cancer.

Key Takeaways

1. Receptors are little protein signals on the outside of the breast cancer that send a signal through the cell, which allows the cancer to grow more quickly.

2. The main receptors that breast cancer cells can have are hormone receptors, which are estrogen and progesterone.

3. The other class is HER2 receptors.

4. Hormone receptors are found on normal breast tissue, and this is how women’s breasts grow during different parts of their life.

5. Certain breast cancers override that system and grow with the use of those hormones, so treatment is done to block the hormones.