Herceptin

I totally rocked it at work today, meaning that it was one of my most productive days since getting cancer.  Maybe I've finally figured out how to ignore the fact that I have cancer?  Or how to effectively distract myself with other things?  Regardless, I'm still feeling very science-y right now, and I feel inspired to bring the science to the cancer side of my life via the blog.  I haven't done that in awhile.

Today's lesson is on how herceptin works.  This is one of my chemo drugs that is specific for my type of cancer (HER2+), and I take it every week for the time being.  To understand how herceptin works, first we need to know that breast cells have a protein on their surface called HER2.  This protein sends a signal to the nucleus that tells the cell to divide.  So-called HER2+ breast cancer cells have too many HER2 proteins on their surface, resulting in too much cell division.  Too much cell division basically results in a tumor, although something must be slightly different in the case of inflammatory breast cancer because there's not exactly a tumor.  Anyway, here's a figure illustrating what I just said, taken from www.herceptin.com:

 Now that we have cancer cells with too many HER2 proteins on their surface, we can see that one way to focus on these cells and not other cells in the body would be to target the HER2.  And that's what herceptin does.  It is an antibody that binds to the HER2 protein, blocking the signal to the nucleus.

Pretty amazing, huh?  I'm just glad that I'm finally to a point where I can research aspects of my own cancer.  It took a surprisingly long time to get to this place.