Immunohistochemistry

Evaluate the use of immunohistochemistry in providing prognostic information of cancer patients.

Introduction:
The immunohistochemistry technique is a process whereby antibodies are used to identify antigens in cells within a tissue section. This mechanism exploits the principle of antibodies specifically binding to antigens in biological tissue sections, the site in which the antibody binds can be seen under a microscope with the use of markers such as fluorescent dyes. This allows antigens of biological interest to be identified and then used to carry out relevant biological research. Immunohistochemistry staining technique is widely used for prognosis of cancers. It allows scientists to easily identify cancerous cells and use this information …show more content…
However it was not until approximately thirty years later in the late 1970s that immunohistochemistry became a powerful tool in diagnostic pathology, it still took some years after that for scientist to realise the techniques great importance (Brennan DJ, Gallagher WM, 2005).
Immunohistochemistry, which utilises antibodies to expose specific antigens in tissues sections, is a powerful technique in providing prognostic information of cancer patients. Due to specific tumour antigens being expressed de novo or up-regulated in certain cancers immunohistochemistry can be used to diagnose different cancers (Duraiyan J et al, 2012). By using specific tumour markers, scientists can use immunohistochemistry to provide prognostic information for a cancer patients. After observing and analysing the targeted antigens in the tumour scientists can determine; the stage and grade of the cancer, identify the cell type, if the cancer is benign or malignant, the origin of metastatic and …show more content…
These aspects need to be considered when using information from immunohistochemistry results to provide a prognosis and potential treatment for cancer patients. Many experiments suggest the use of immunohistochemistry as a good complementary technique, in which its results should not solely be relied on. Instead other relevant prognostic techniques should also be used and compared with to come to a complete prognostic for cancer patients. The Committee of Quality Control in Immunohistochemistry of the French Pathology Society published an article in 1997. This article suggested that diagnostic mistakes whilst using immunohistochemistry are due to two main causes. The lack of antigen retrieval techniques and amplifying methods which were observed under low microscopic power (De Matos, 2010). An experiment has been carried out on an eight-marker (immunohistochemistry based) prognostic test for patients. The results provided information on the tumour size and other relevant information in order to provide a prognosis for the patients. The group then randomly selected test and validation sets and used a novel score to place patients into three groups. They had excellent results in their test set however the prognostic strength was significantly reduced in the validation set (Crabb SJ, 2008). Which suggests that doctors

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