HER2

We also don't know anything about, really, about how these women were treated.

This was before the day that we were even doing things like checking HER2 on breast cancers, right? So it does not reflect modern-day breast cancer treatment.

And HER2 for our listeners is one of the oncogenes,

right? Yes, it's one of the markers that we check and we really tailor our treatment if you have a HER2 positive breast cancer.

And so when you look at higher risk of recurrence, we don't know.

These were not women that were treated the way we treat women now.

So in routine use, we have clinically relevant subtypes of breast cancer that we can essentially identify from our routine pathology report based on protein staining.

We can tell, is this a tumor that is estrogen receptor positive, progesterone receptor positive, and is it HER2 protein?

And what does that mean, estrogen receptor positive? What's the implications?

So it means that there are lots of places on the tumor tissue where female hormones essentially can fit into and activate growth properties.

Some of them do diffuse out, which is also part of their effectiveness, but they're quite effective in multiple different tumor types.

And we can talk about the different breast cancer subtypes that have benefited from them.

In particular, maybe you could talk a little bit about the role of these drugs in both HER2 positive breast cancer, where we've made unbelievable strides in the last 20 years.

I mean, really just incredible strides.

So I was to do that because then it's then follows.

But I was also to start a targeted therapy called Herceptin because my cancer was HER2 positive, which is just, I guess, another type of cancer.

It was estrogen, progesterone positive and HER2 positive, so triple positive.

HER2 positive used to be a Until 20-odd years ago, there's now a therapy called Herceptin, which specifically targets what happens there to increase – survival rate so it was imperative that I had that treatment but that's one that I couldn't have when I was pregnant so hence being induced to have Lane a bit earlier because I needed to start this treatment as soon as possible so my oncologist said I'll give you like four to six weeks little grace period I know that bonding with your baby's important I said I'll take six thanks not four I'll have as much time as I can so yeah we in the meantime I ended up going through a surgery to have a port-a-cath inserted into my chest for easy venous access, I guess, when you're having a lot more treatment and a lot more regular treatment.

Chemo is not really good on your veins either, and I never had great ones anyway.

So I had a port-a-cath inserted into my chest.

Absolutely.

And with trastuzumab, the original postdoc was looking at how HER2-positive breast cancer cells responded to that drug directly.

And it was a real line, right? If the cancer was HER2-positive, you got the drug, and if it was HER2-negative, you didn't get it.

But we were looking at what would have been classified then as HER2-negative and how it responded to trastuzumab.

And, you know, you fast forward 12, 13, 14 years, they're now going back and looking how these HER2-targeted ADCs responded.

are working with HER2-low or HER2-negative breast cancers as well.

It's been a very fruitful area to work, but it's also work that I think is still contributing to the broader literature today.

It has, and it's also been, I must say, I think your work has been good in general for helping to develop cancer research more broadly writ in Ireland.