Hormone Therapy & Immunotherapy

Checkpoint proteins are a natural part of your body’s immune system that help identify healthy cells versus foreign invaders. When working as expected, checkpoint proteins bind to the surface of your white blood cells known as T cells, creating immune checkpoint proteins. These signal to your immune system that these cells are healthy and should be left alone. Sometimes, however, these proteins bind with cancer cells, allowing them to grow and replicate uninhibitedly.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors prevent your checkpoint proteins from binding with the cancerous cells, helping your immune system correctly identify and kill off the cancer.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors can be used against Hodgkin lymphoma and cancers with solid tumors, including:

• Breast Cancer
• Bladder Cancer
• Cervical Cancer
• Colorectal Cancer
• Head and Neck Cancer
• Liver Cancer
• Lung Cancer
• Skin Cancer
• Stomach Cancer

Side effects related to checkpoint inhibitors will often vary based on your health before cancer, but you may experience:

• Diarrhea
• Fatigue
• Rashes

One of the most innovative new forms of immunotherapy is being used by Broward Health’s cancer leaders to treat metastatic forms of the disease: antibody-drug conjugates (ADC).

ADC works similarly to the legendary Trojan horse. Our cancer experts intravenously introduce monoclonal antibodies (mAb) — man-made molecules that can mimic, modify, enhance, or reinforce your immune system’s attack — to your bloodstream. Once injected, the mAb chemically binds to the proteins found on the surface of the cancer cell, allowing the therapeutic element to invade the cells, often damaging and eliminating the cancer.

At Broward Health, we have begun using ADC to treat the following types of cancer:

• Breast
• Lymphoma
• Multiple myeloma

As a novel therapy, speak with your cancer care team to learn if ADC is right for you.

Hormone therapy, not to be confused with hormone replacement therapy, at Broward Health is used in conjunction with other treatments like chemotherapy or radiation therapy to stop or slow hormone-receptor positive (HR+) breast cancers.

HR+ cancers feed off the estrogen or progesterone naturally produced by your endocrine system. To combat them, hormone therapy, sometimes referred to as endocrine therapy, impacts or even blocks your body’s ability to produce estrogen or progesterone. This effectively starves the HR+ breast cancer cells, slowing or stopping the tumor’s growth.

We use hormone therapy in three ways at Broward Health:

• Adjuvant Therapy – This lowers the risk of HR+ cancers from returning following your primary cancer treatment.
• Neoadjuvant Therapy – This therapy is often used to decrease the size of HR+ tumors in your breasts prior to a lumpectomy or before starting radiation therapy.
• In conjunction with your radiation therapy or chemotherapy to kill metastatic cancer or recurring HR+ breast cancer.