April 2009

There has been a hiatus since the last version, as I have been working on a chapter on immunohistochemistry for the next edition of Spencer's Pathology of the Lung. This has entailed ensuring that the information on the pertinent antibodies is as complete as possible.
I have included a page on the immunohistochemistry of sarcomatoid mesothelioma.
DPC4 helps to distinguish ovarian borderline mucinous tumours from pancreatic carcinoma metastatic to the ovary.
The IARC has made the full text of six volumes of the World Health Organization Classification of Tumours freely available at http://www.iarc.fr/en/Publications/PDFs-online/Cancer-Pathology-and-Genetics. Since the books are in PDF format, I will need to give some thought as to whether I can link to specific tumours.
In our department, I have introduced an Excel spreadsheet to record the control sections. Each antibody for each day is colour coded as good (green), some minor defect (pale green), some significant defect (amber) or as failing to work at all (red). So problem antibodies show up as a line of amber, bad days as a column of amber. Comments are used to record the nature of each problem: fly the cursor over any cell with a red triangle in its corner and you will be able to read the comment. You are welcome to use this spreadsheet if you wish. You will just need to delete our data and adjust the antibody repertoire and date range. The Visual Basic function that works behind the scenes to counts the cells of each column is from Ozgrid.com. This function is the "macro" about which you will see a warning when opening the spreadsheet: it is safe to do so.
Dr Alex Giménez has set up an immunohistochemsitry Wiki at http://forpathologists.com/wiki/tiki-index.php It is early days but take a look.