Testing for Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor in Lung Cancer: Have We Learned Anything From HER-2 Testing?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

on the correlation between theexpression of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) andprognosis in non–small-cell lung carcinoma. A number ofobservationsareworthmentioning.Inthetechnicalpartofthestudy, the authors chose to use tissue microarrays (TMA).Given the real and perceived heterogeneity of EGFR distribu-tion in tumor sections, as we routinely encounter in our prac-tice, the use of an entire tissue section may have been moreaccurate in scoring the results, particularly because no studyhas yet validated the applicability of TMA for EGFR testing byimmunohistochemistry (IHC) and fluorescence in situ hy-bridization (FISH). This is especially relevant given that pub-lishedstudiesalreadydocumentedsignificantheterogeneityofEGFR expression when examined on tissue sections.