September 2004

Until recently, antibodies have been either rabbit polyclonals or mouse monoclonals. The polyclonal antibodies from rabbits have the advantage of sensitivity, but batch-to-batch variability and non-specific staining have been problems. Monoclonal antibodies from mice confer greater specificity, but immunoreactivity has been weak in some cases. The successful production of monoclonal antibodies from rabbit hybridomas is likely to produce a new generation of monoclonal antibodies with the promise of both specificity and sensitivity. One of the first of these, an anti-cyclin D1, is reported to address the known capriciousness of the staining experienced with the equivalent mouse monoclonal antibody1. There are also antigens which are simply not immunospecific in rodents, but are in rabbits.

There are continuing publications on CDX-2, documenting positivity in intestinal-type sinonasal adenocarcinoma.

There has been a recent abstract reporting a significant rate of positivity for TTF-1 in primary ovarian carcinomas.

Apo D may be useful in differentiating DFSP from fibrous histiocytoma.

 

Having found a reference (OCT4, reference 2) where the full text of a paper is freely available on line, I have linked directly to both the manuscript and to specific tables. This is particularly useful, as it saves me documenting the 3439 tumours that were negative for OCT4! I think that, in most cases, I will leave it to you to check the PubMed site to see if the full text is freely available; that way you will get the latest status of the paper. However, where I can save doing a lot of abstraction, I will link to tables. Is this how you would like to see things develop?

I hope you are still finding all this immunshitochemistry4 useful.

References

1Cheuk, W., K. O. Wong, et al. (2004). "Consistent immunostaining for cyclin D1 can be achieved on a routine basis using a newly available rabbit monoclonal antibody." Am J Surg Pathol 28(6): 801-7.

2Spieker-Polet, H., P. Sethupathi, et al. (1995). "Rabbit monoclonal antibodies: generating a fusion partner to produce rabbit-rabbit hybridomas." Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 92(20): 9348-52.

3Rief, N., C. Waschow, et al. (1998). "Production and characterization of a rabbit monoclonal antibody against human CDC25C phosphatase." Hybridoma 17(4): 389-94.

4Stephen S Sternberg. Memoirs of an Editor. American Journal of Surgical Pathology 2004;28:821-4.