Estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) mRNA copy numbers in immunohistochemically ERα-positive-, and negative breast cancer tissues

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Abstract
The presence of ERα is the basis for treating breast cancer patients with targeted molecular therapies that block estrogen stimulation of breast cancer cell division. To select patients for the above therapies, currently, the ERα presence in breast cancer tissues is determined in clinical laboratories by microscopically scoring the slides subjected to immunohistochemistry (IHC). This method is not quantitative, highly subjective and requires large amount of tumor tissue, therefore, cannot be applied to sterotactic and ultrasound guided biopsy samples. To circumvent these problems, we previously developed quantitative real-time PCR based molecular assay that can be applied to determine mRNA copies of ERα in picogram amounts of total RNA from tumor samples. However, it is not known how the mRNA copy numbers correlate to IHC positive and negative status.