The finding highlighted by the work of Pang et al. (2014) supports and extends work done at the RNA level showing that lower expression of the type III TGF-β receptor (TBR3), or β-glycan predicts a poor outcome and increased invasiveness of breast cancer. TBR3 acts as a co-receptor for TGFβ isoforms. Although at first seemingly counter-intuitive, a possible clarifying mechanism for this observation was suggested in the discussion that TBR3 can undergo ectodomain shedding, and thereby act as a decoy receptor. This notion is interesting and suggests that development of a TBR3 mimetic could possibly be considered as a breast cancer therapeutic.