The importance of simultaneous determination of breast cancer biomarkers

Abstract

It is shown that steroid hormone receptors by themselves are not sufficiently strong prognostic factors in management of breast cancer. For that reason, simultaneous consideration of different biomarkers seems to be more appropriate for clinical use, i.e. selections of patients with high/inter-mediate/low risk of disease outcome. However, the amount of tumor material available from breast carcinoma can preclude determination of estrogen- regulated biomarkers together with estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor. The aim of this study was to assess the possibility of estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor determination by a single-point instead of five-point biochemical method. Our results demonstrated that the correlation between measurements of estrogen and progesterone receptor contents obtained by the five-point and single-point assay in the total population was very high. Consequently, we could use the single-point assay instead of five-point assay for estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor determination, thus making possible determination of other molecular biomarkers from the same breast carcinoma.