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Updated: Jul 19, 2026
Building Up a High-throughput Screening Platform to Assess the Heterogeneity of HER2 Gene Amplification in Breast Cancers
Published on: December 5, 2017
Intratumoral heterogeneity of her-2/neu in invasive mammary carcinomas using fluorescence in-situ hybridization and
Sandra J Shin1, Elizabeth Hyjek, Erin Early
1Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, New York 10021, USA. sjshin@med.cornell.edu
Abstract:
Fluorescence in-situ hybridization is increasingly being used to determine HER-2/neu status in patients with breast carcinoma. The possibility that intratumoral heterogeneity of HER-2/neu gene amplification may potentially contribute to inaccurate assessment of HER-2/neu status was investigated in routine cases of invasive mammary carcinomas. From 169 representative formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded blocks of invasive duct mammary carcinomas with grade 3 architecture, 48 cases were analyzed by fluorescence in-situ hybridization and 59 analyses were performed. Intratumoral heterogeneity for HER-2/neu gene amplification was demonstrated in only 5 (16%) of 31 cases where morphologically similar areas of a single tumor were analyzed. We conclude from this study that intratumoral heterogeneity of HER-2/neu gene amplification is a demonstrable but relatively uncommon occurrence. For invasive mammary carcinomas, the accurate assessment of HER-2/neu status by fluorescence in-situ hybridization analysis is not significantly confounded by intratumoral heterogeneity of HER-2/neu gene amplification in individual tumors.
