Scientists at Scripps Florida find new targets that could increase effectiveness and reduce side effects in breast cancer treatments

the Oncology Nurse Advisor take:

Some breast cancers are driven by receptors that bind estrogen and progesterone. When the hormones bind to these receptors in cancer cells, the cancer cells receive a signal to grow. Scientists found that the progesterone receptor has two activation domains: AF1 and AF2. These findings are important because in some genetic mutations, AF2 is deleted yet the cancer continues to grow using its AF1 domain. Scientists at the Florida campus of the Scripps Research Institute used hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX), a high-precision, high-sensitivity mapping technique, to measure the interactions between the two domains. Scientists hope to investigate the implications for prostate cancer, another hormone-driven cancer.