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Patient Outcomes Linked To Biomarker Levels

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the good-science-needs-practice dept.

JonN writes to tell us Science Daily is reporting that researchers at Yale University have discovered that current pathology methods for biomarker detection can be dramatically altered depending on the concentration of antibodies used. From the article: "Biomarkers may have the power to provide diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic information for personalized medicine." said Donald Earl Henson, M.D., of the George Washington University Cancer Institute, in "Back to the Drawing Board on Immunohistochemistry and Predictive Factors," an accompanying editorial. "However, immunohistochemistry, a popular technique for evaluating biomarker expression, may contain procedural flaws that jeopardize its promise."

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hmmmm .... by kfg · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What's getting me is that I find this article and the first post more lucid, understandable and plainspoke than the previous article on Ambient Findability.

    KFG

  2. Re:Oh nooooes. by kfg · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I can say is, look at the stock over the past 5 years. . .

    All I can say is that I don't consider stock performance scientific data; even with regards to stock performance.

    KFG

  3. Everybody knows that! by ponos · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Well, I do IHC as part of my PhD and everybody knows that you have to keep a strict standardised procedure to get comparable results. We routinely "standardise" new antibodies until we get a clean signal and we also use other methods to verify the results (like Western Blot). Anyway, the "research" antibodies are rarely of sufficient quality to rely on them for everyday medical uses, because they need very precise handling (you wouldn't want to rely on an alpha version of something, would you?). On the other hand, most commercial "tested" antibodies that are used in hospitals are very robust and provide consistent results with very slight differences. We jokingly say that "you could spit in the solution and it would still work".

    At a design level, IHC is often problematic because of several key facts, especially the fact that it has to be "evaluated" by someone, using rather lax criteria. As as general rule, most observers obtain widely different results (i.e. 5-10% difference is considered very low, while 20-30% can be quite common).

    I personally don't trust IHC that much, but those applications that make it to medical use have been tested many times and are reliable or at least more reliable than previous methods. In the future, new methods that combine IHC with automated fractal analysis, for example, could improve error margins. The linked article seems to promote an automated type of analysis (didn't read the nasty details) and is naturally expected to "magnify" the shortcomings of traditional IHC. I would welcome this type of technology in my lab (hate to evaluate IHC slides, let the computer do it!).

    P.