Read about Erika Lojko’s fight against triple negative breast cancer and her motivation to live.
Triple-Negative Breast Cancer
This type of cancer is harder to treat than some — but we’re up for the challenge.
When you have breast cancer, we perform a variety of tests to diagnose what type of the disease you have and what stage it’s in. These factors and others help us determine the treatment options that are likely to work best for you.
We test all breast cancer tumors for groups of proteins, called receptors. We test for three types of these receptors:
- HER2 (a gene in the cancer cells)
- Estrogen receptors (ER)
- Progesterone receptors (PR)
These receptors are what allow tumors to respond to the targeted breast cancer therapies we use. If your breast cancer tumor doesn’t have enough of the three receptors — or if it has none of these receptors at all — we say it’s triple-negative breast cancer.
Triple-negative breast cancer is one of the more difficult types to treat. It doesn’t respond well to treatments like biological therapy and hormone therapy, which are more targeted therapies that work for other types of breast cancer.
It may be difficult to treat, but it’s not impossible. We have treatment options for triple-negative breast cancer, and we’re ready to put them to work. We understand what it takes to beat triple-negative breast cancer, and we’re here to help you do just that.