HER2 Support Group Forums - View Single Post - once again, ER+her2+ breast cancer is found to behave differently than ER-her2+

Lani · 08-30-2012, 08:05 PM

I have posted many times before on how mets can differ from primary tumor with respect to ER PR and even her2 status

I have even posted how Stephanie Jeffrey @ Stanford with her MagSweeper technology for CTC identification and typing has shown tremendous heterogeneity of CTCs in patients--even triple negative CTCs floating around in the blood of her2+Stage IV breast cancer patients on herceptin

There are many ways this can come about. If you apply weed killer to a lawn, those plants not susceptible to it will take over and not have any competition for nutrients. It is not as if the weeds (cancer cells with different ER PR and/or her2 status ) weren't there before, they were just out-competed. Another way this can occur is by new mutations (takes much longer actually) or by epigenetic silencing ie, a glob of methylation groups or acetylation groups grabs onto the DNA just at the point where a specific gene is located and needs to be "read" by mRNA to be turned into a protein (DNA is the recipe, mRNA is the cook, protein is the cake or souffle) If the ER gene or PR gene or her2 gene is covered in goop the cook can't read the recipe and that ingredient gets left out of the cake/souffle)

The last way to explain it and this week some Stanford scientists from Irving Weissman's lab and Staphen Quake's lab found that cancer stem cells probably are not an entity that develops overnight but rather the result of a series of mutations that occur stepwise in a normal stem cell and finally in the end result in a cell out of control. This is felt to explain why cancer usually happens in older people as it takes quite a while for just the specific step mutations to occur in sequence to end up with that result.

There are treatments which have resulted in ER- patients becoming er+ and thus treatable with antihormonals. I think I may even have posted something about it on this board.

Hope this helps.

Feel free to put "conversion estrogen receptor negative to estrogen receptor postitive breast cancer" and "conversion of receptor or ER status" into entrez pubmed and see what you come up with.

Good luck

08-30-2012, 08:05 PM	#8
Lani Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 4,778	Re: once again, ER+her2+ breast cancer is found to behave differently than ER-her2+ I have posted many times before on how mets can differ from primary tumor with respect to ER PR and even her2 status I have even posted how Stephanie Jeffrey @ Stanford with her MagSweeper technology for CTC identification and typing has shown tremendous heterogeneity of CTCs in patients--even triple negative CTCs floating around in the blood of her2+Stage IV breast cancer patients on herceptin There are many ways this can come about. If you apply weed killer to a lawn, those plants not susceptible to it will take over and not have any competition for nutrients. It is not as if the weeds (cancer cells with different ER PR and/or her2 status ) weren't there before, they were just out-competed. Another way this can occur is by new mutations (takes much longer actually) or by epigenetic silencing ie, a glob of methylation groups or acetylation groups grabs onto the DNA just at the point where a specific gene is located and needs to be "read" by mRNA to be turned into a protein (DNA is the recipe, mRNA is the cook, protein is the cake or souffle) If the ER gene or PR gene or her2 gene is covered in goop the cook can't read the recipe and that ingredient gets left out of the cake/souffle) The last way to explain it and this week some Stanford scientists from Irving Weissman's lab and Staphen Quake's lab found that cancer stem cells probably are not an entity that develops overnight but rather the result of a series of mutations that occur stepwise in a normal stem cell and finally in the end result in a cell out of control. This is felt to explain why cancer usually happens in older people as it takes quite a while for just the specific step mutations to occur in sequence to end up with that result. There are treatments which have resulted in ER- patients becoming er+ and thus treatable with antihormonals. I think I may even have posted something about it on this board. Hope this helps. Feel free to put "conversion estrogen receptor negative to estrogen receptor postitive breast cancer" and "conversion of receptor or ER status" into entrez pubmed and see what you come up with. Good luck