Department of Pathology, Tata Memorial Hospital, Dr E. Borges Road, Mumbai, India.
Indian J Med Res. 2010 Sep;132:287-94.
BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES: Determination of HER2 status in breast cancer has become important to identify potential candidates for anti-HER2 therapy. In this study we compared fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) for the determination of HER2 status in breast cancer patients referred to a tertiary care referral centre.
A total of 200 cases of invasive breast cancer were evaluated for HER2 status using IHC and FISH and results were compared.
The IHC 3+ (93.9%) and IHC negative (85.9%) cases showed good concordance with the corresponding FISH results; while 66.6 per cent of IHC 2+ cases showed gene amplification by FISH. In addition, hormone receptor expression and HER2 gene status showed a statistically significant inverse association (P<0.05).
INTERPRETATION & CONCLUSION: These findings reaffirm IHC as a prudent first-step to screen tissue samples for HER2 status and to determine suitability for technically demanding FISH test and the dual coloured FISH as a gold standard for determination of HER2/neu status in IHC equivocal cases of breast carcinoma.
在乳腺癌中确定 HER2 状态对于识别潜在的抗 HER2 治疗候选者变得非常重要。在这项研究中，我们比较了荧光原位杂交（FISH）和免疫组织化学（IHC）在转介至三级医疗中心的乳腺癌患者中确定 HER2 状态的情况。
共评估了 200 例浸润性乳腺癌的 HER2 状态，分别使用 IHC 和 FISH 进行评估，并比较了结果。
IHC 3+（93.9%）和 IHC 阴性（85.9%）病例与相应的 FISH 结果具有良好的一致性；而 66.6%的 IHC 2+病例通过 FISH 显示基因扩增。此外，激素受体表达和 HER2 基因状态呈统计学显著负相关（P<0.05）。
这些发现再次证实 IHC 是筛查组织样本 HER2 状态并确定是否适合技术要求较高的 FISH 检测的谨慎的第一步，并且双色 FISH 是确定乳腺癌 IHC 不确定病例中 HER2/neu 状态的金标准。
