microarray-based Clinical diagnostic tests

 Pathwork Diagnostics, and the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine has initiated an investigational study Genomics-Based diagnostic Test to determine a tumor’s origin so that tissue-specific management can begin.

The test uses microarrays from Affymetrix

More news on Pathworks website 

mobile phones can interfere with vital intensive care equipment in Hospitals

Evidence that mobile phones can interfere with vital intensive care equipment has been strengthened.  More than half the hospital ventilators tested by Dutch researchers stopped working properly when a mobile was switched on nearby.

A total of 61 different medical devices were tested, and the majority could be affected by the presence of a mobile. In particular, nine intensive care ventilators were checked, and seven of these could be “influenced” by mobiles.

Other devices which suffered problems were dialysis machines, external pacemaker machines, feeding pumps and even air humidifiers.

Chikken Tikka and Alzheimer’s !!

Does eating a lotf of spicy curry eliminates the chances of geting cancer and diseases like Alzheimer’s thats a yummy proposition, I wish it was that easy, but apparently the Indian curry cuisines has the capacity to prevent the onset or delay the disease, but dont reach out for the qwik e mart yet. The curry doesnt do the job all by itself ,one of the key spices used ‘the Turmeric’ does that work, Ayurvedic medicine practioners has known the value of turmeric for a very long time, the stuff even finds its ways into soaps and cosmetics           

Scientists have for the first time isolated bisdemethoxycurcumin, the active ingredient of curcuminoids, a natural substance found in turmeric root that stimulates the immune system to destroy brain-clogging proteins that cause Alzheimer’s.

Researchers found that bisdemethoxycurcumin boosted immune cells called macrophages to clear amyloid beta. Amyloid beta is a peptide that forms the plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease.

Amyloid plaques are found outside the neurons. Two major pathways are involved in breakdown of APP (amyloid precursor protein) which makes the protein called B-amyloid protein. responsible for plaques .One pathway is normal and causes no problem. The second results in the changes seen in Alzheimer’s and in some of the other dementias.

Microarray to detect mutations in largest Human Gene

The average human gene consists of 3000 bases, but sizes vary greatly, with the largest known human gene being dystrophin at 2.4 million bases. Residing at Chromosome 4 it has long been of interest to the medical community because its the gene responsible for huntington’s disease, polycystic kidney disease, a form of muscular dystrophy and a variety of other inherited disorders. Chromosome 2 is noteworthy for being the second largest human chromosome, trailing only chromosome 1 in size. It is also home to the gene with the longest known, protein-coding sequence – a 280,000 base pair gene that codes for a muscle protein, called titin, which is 33,000 amino acids long.

Now reseacrhers at Emory university has developed a microarray based test to chek for mutations in this gene. The current test do not detect all types of mutation that affects 1 in 3500 males according to the university wesbite.

Mutations in the dystrophin such as point mutations in a sequence of DNA can result in mistakes in gene  expression and nonfunctional proteins that causes Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD).

A detailed presentation of the advantages of the test is available at the Emory Genetics Testing website. The test offeredon the Nimblegen CGH array platform gains more prominance as the company is now being acquired by Roche who has plans to dominate the clinical microarray market with its products in genetics testing space

The emory university Genetics testing lab offers numerous other genetic tests

Genetics and Business

I have been busy lately but found some time to go through an interesting story and a good article published in scientist magazine

1. Father-in-law of now-infamous extensively drug-resistant TB patient studies tuberculosis at the CDC, and is now under review by the agency
2. Genotyping with PCR -How to choose the right approach

I am working on an article about consolidation in Microarray and Bioinformatics industry so interesting to know about GenoLogics Announces Bioinformatics Partnership with Illumina  so is the  news of Roche acquiring Nimblgen and the end of patent wars with Affymetrix, Roche has also acquired 454 life sciences, It seems Roche plans to get inot clinical genomcis and theranostics application industry, the company already has FDA approved amplichip CYP450 arrays for clinical diagnostics

With many other acquisitions in the last one year  and many more in the pipeline it seems paydays for early starters.

Device helps Third World fight AIDS- a Winner of World Bank Development Marketplace Award

Guava Technologies and PointCare Technologies are two coompanis etup to provide life saving tests to HIV patients at lower costs.

Former President Bill Clinton’s foundation last year signed a deal with privately held Guava Technologies Inc. to make smaller CD4 counting machines available in Africa at a discount

PointCare Technologies Inc., which makes a hematology device used for managing anti-retroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS patients, was one of the 22 winners selected this week in the World Bank Development Marketplace.

The competitive grant program funds creative, small-scale development projects that have the potential to be expanded or replicated.

Privately held PointCare was one of 104 finalists, selected from 3,000 proposals, who showcased their proposal to judges in Washington, D.C., this week.

PointCare’s portable AuRICA NOW testing equipment, which can be operated by nonlaboratory-trained personnel in rural areas, enables HIV-infected patients to be qualified for anti-retroviral therapy, the company said.

The project, which will receive $198,300 from the World Bank, will be carried out at St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Malawi and at 11 outreach clinics and six health centers in the area.

Setup by Petra B. Krauledat and husband W. Peter Hansen after their journey through the sub-Saharan Africa, where they talked to medical workers and patients about the need for a better way to analyze blood for the crucial immune-system cells that signal when a patient needs to begin taking anti-retroviral medicines.

Indian genetic database offers R&D advances

Imagine a diabetic patient from NewYork being put on a drug regimen distinct from a patient London. Personalized medicine allows tratement to decided on the genetic make up of the individual. Genetically europeans and asians and others have different ways of responding to same treatment genetically

FortunatelyIf Indian researchers have their way, such customised medication based on genetic differences could be a possibility for a range of illnesses.

A consortium of Indian scientists recently completed a genetic database for India, home to one of the world’s most ethnically diverse populations that will allow researchers to understand the genetic predisposition of ethnic groups to diseases. Icelanders are considered for Human genome project because of very less number such diversity

The genetic map will enable global and Indian pharma companies to enhance research on predictive medicine and targeted drugs. Research firm TCG Life Sciences is about to become the first private player to use the database.

The consortium collected data on the genetic codes of over a 1,000 genes from among 15,000 individuals belonging to Indian sub-populations

Another user of the data is the clinical diabetics’ consortium, which aims to identify if there are specific genetic reasons for a particular ethnic group to be predisposed to the disease. It is already known that some cultures are pre disposed to certain diseases so Indian are more prone to heart attack and diabetes and such

The Indian Genome Variation Consortium, a public-private partnership that networks six Council of Indian Scientific and Industrial Research labs and some private software firms, undertook the genetic variation mapping.

UK is appealing for volunteers to help worlds biggest medical experiment project- to understand impact of Genetics and life style in illness and medical treatment

 UK is appealing for volunteers to help worlds biggest medical experiment project- to understand impact of Genetics and lifestyle in health and medical treatment

The  BBC reports about a medical experiment aiming to be the biggest in the world is appealing for volunteers to help end Scotland’s reputation as the “sick man of Europe”.

The project named as  UK Biobank will be the world’s biggest resource for the study of the role of nature and nurture in health and disease.

Funded and guided under the supervision of leading scientists from the UK and around the world. Funded by the  Wellcome Trust, the UK’s largest independent medical research charity, the  Medical Research Council, the Department of Health, the Scottish Executive and the Northwest Regional Development Agency. and many other major medical research charities, including the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK. The project is also supported by the National Health Service.

claiming to help not just the volunteer, but for the future generation to come the £61m UK Biobank project will track the health of thousands of people for up to 30 years.

Information and DNA gathered from volunteers will be used by researchers to help tackle serious diseases.

Volunteers will be asked to attend an assessment centre where they will fill out a lifestyle questionnaire, have body measurements such as bone density, blood pressure, height and weight recorded, and donate a small sample of blood and urine for long-term storage as a resource for researchers in the future.

Researchers will study the relationship between our genes, our lifestyles and our current health to find out why some people develop certain illnesses and others do not.

It is hoped the project will eventually include 500,000 volunteers from across Britain, making it the biggest study of its type ever undertaken.

The Biobank will run alongside the complementary Generation Scotland project, which focuses on how genes inherited from our parents affect the likelihood of developing diseases.

Data collected by the two projects will be used to help prevent and develop new treatments for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, mental health illnesses, osteoporosis and arthritis.

12 DNA tests that Could Change Your Life-selected by Forbes

The complete list is published at forbes website

• Breast Cancer
• Adult-Onset Diabetes
• Obesity
• Drug Metabolism
• Crohn’s Disease
• Prostate Cancer
• Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
• Rett Syndrome
• Macular Degeneration
• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Heart Attack

Gene Testing:

Related Blogs

eyeondna , gensherpa , OmicsOmics

Beem me Doctor

science fiction becoming reality, with a study from researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.The Tricorder first appeared in Statrek is to become a reality for use in personalized medicine,

More specifically, an Italian company is working on creating an inexpensive, hand-held medical device capable of detecting cancer by merely swiping it across the patient’s body. Wired News reports:

  The research team is reporting that by looking at images from radiology scans – such as the CT scans a cancer patient routinely gets – radiologists can discern most of the genetic activity of a tumor. Such information could lead to diagnosing and treating patients individually, based on the unique characteristics of their disease.

“Potentially in the future one can use imaging to directly reveal multiple features of diseases that will make it much easier to carry out personalized medicine, where you are making diagnoses and treatment decisions based exactly on what is happening in a person,” said co-senior author Howard Chang, MD, PhD, assistant professor of dermatology at Stanford, who led the genomics arm of the study.

The study’s other senior author is Michael Kuo, MD, assistant professor of interventional radiology at UCSD, who said their work will help doctors obtain the molecular details of a specific tumor or disease without having to remove body tissue for a biopsy. “Ideally, we would have personalized medicine achieved in a noninvasive manner,” said Kuo, who spearheaded the project in 2001 while he was a radiology resident at Stanford.

More News

Microarray based DRUG DISCOVERY and CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS and biosensor designed to identify viruses

 Prof. David Dandy of Colorado State University chemical and biological engineering has proven that called microarray assays can be used for biomedical disease and drug screening assays could rapidly increase drug discovery,

Although not ready for hospital or office use, microarrays represent a novel miniaturized multi-spot diagnostic format that has huge potential for patient diagnosis if found reliable and approved.

Smaller is often better, according to a new scientific study that appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Professor David Dandy, head of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Colorado State. Dandy co-wrote the paper with David Grainger, a former chemistry professor at Colorado State who now is chair of the Department of Pharmaceutics & Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah.

The study was funded by a multi-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“This work is extremely useful from an industrial perspective,” said Michael Lochhead, chief scientist at Accelr8 Technology Corp., a Denver-based developer of innovative materials and instrumentation for advanced applications in medical instrumentation, basic research, drug discovery, and bio-detection.

The critical importance of this work is illustrated by the fact that, to date, a single microarray-based test has been approved by the FDA for clinical use.

According to Roche, the manufacturer of this diagnostic microarray, “This test analyzes a patient’s Cytochrome P450 2D6 and 2C19 genotypes from genomic DNA extracted from a blood sample. Test results will allow physicians to consider unique genetic information from patients in selecting medications and doses of medications for a wide variety of common conditions such as cardiac diseases, pain and cancer.”

 

 

Theranostics-Genetics Testing for Clinical Diagnostics for Personalized Medicine

Theranostics is the term used to describe the proposed process of diagnostic therapy for individual patients – to test them for possible reaction to taking a new medication and to tailor a treatment for them based on the test results or in plain english Personalized Medicine.

Personalized medicine is the use of detailed information about a patient’s genotype or level of gene expression and a patient’s clinical data in order to select a medication, therapy or preventative measure that is particularly suited to that patient at the time of administration

The test results are used to tailor treatment, usually with a drug that targets a particular gene or protein.

Seen the movie Gattaca it shows glipses of the what to come.

This method is looked as the possible end result of new advances made in Pharmacogenomics, Drug Discovery using Genetics, Molecular Biology and Microarray chips technology

The technology is set to grow by leaps as new companies are introducing new microarray chip which are getting cheaper day by day

Already there are microarraychips approved by FDA for clinical diagnostics

DNA computer for diagnostics

REsearchers at columbia university medical centre newyork have developed a DNA-based computer that could lead to faster and more accurate diagnosis of west nile virus and bird flu.

It is the first “medium -scale integrated molecular circuit” it is the most powerful comuting device of its type.

Joanne Macdonald a virologist at columbia’s dapertment of medicine lead the team that developed MAYA-II (molecular arrays of YES and AND logic gates) a computer whose circuits consists of DNA instead of silicon . These computers can be used in fluids such as a a sample of blood in the body and make decisions at the level of single level

 In 2003  Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC.

Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips,  the single DNA molecule that provides the computer with the input data also provides all the necessary fuel.

Think of DNA as software, and enzymes as hardware. Put them together in a test tube. The way in which these molecules undergo chemical reactions with each other allows simple operations to be performed as a byproduct of the reactions. The scientists tell the devices what to do by controlling the composition of the DNA software molecules. It’s a completely different approach to pushing electrons around a dry circuit in a conventional computer.

To the naked eye, the DNA computer looks like clear water solution in a test tube. There is no mechanical device. A trillion bio-molecular devices could fit into a single drop of water. Instead of showing up on a computer screen, results are analyzed using a technique that allows scientists to see the length of the DNA output molecule.

Defra funds team to build microarray biochip to detect disease outbreaks

A single test for more than 600 deadly viruses is being developed by a group of Defra-funded scientists, offering the possibility of spotting a disease outbreak in hours rather than days.

The microarray, which is being led by the Central Science Laboratory near York, with £1.5m funding from Defra, will detect viruses that affect humans, animals, plants, fish and bees including avian influenza, rabies and foot and mouth.

Animal and plant researchers will be able to use the same test to identify many viruses, saving time and resources in the event of an outbreak It will also help to quickly identify when a virus has jumped from one species to another and when new strains of existing disease emerge in the future.

its not so much of junk DNA- University of Oxford Scientists discoveres Cancer cure with it

 Junk DNA is not junk after all

Recently, scientists at the University of Oxford have discovered that ‘junk’ genetic material can switch off cancer tumours, preventing them from growing.

By using RNA to switch off a gene involved in controlling cell division, Oxford University scientists may have found a role for RNA in developing new cancer therapies. RNA is the mirror image of DNA, and is used to pass on instructions to the cell to build the proteins that run every body function.

The Human Genome Project found that human DNA carries approximately 34,000 genes that produce proteins. The remaining majority of the genome constituted what was considered to be junk DNA as it had no obvious function. However, this is set to change.

‘‘There has been a quiet revolution taking place in biology in past few years,’’ said Dr Alexandre Akoulitchev, a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford. ‘‘Scientists have begun to see ‘junk’ DNA as having an important function. The variety of RNA types produced from this so called ‘junk’ is staggering and the functional implications are huge.”

Akoulitchev studied the RNA that regulates a gene called DHFR. This gene produces an enzyme that controls the production of molecules called tetrahydrofolate and thymine that cells need to divide rapidly.

“Switching off the DHFR gene could help prevent ordinary cells from developing into cancerous tumour cells, by slowing down their replication. In fact, one of the first anti-cancer drugs, Methotrexate, acts by binding and inhibiting the enzyme produced by this gene. Targeting the gene itself would cut the enzyme out of the picture altogether. Understanding how we can use RNA to switch off or inhibit DHFR and other genes may have important therapeutic implications for developing new anti-cancer treatments.”

This research was funded by The Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.

Original paper: Repression of the human dihydrofolate reductase gene by a non-coding interfering transcript was published in Nature on 22^nd January 2006.

Microarray based Bio Detection Technologies

DNA microarray detection of antimicrobial resistance genes in diverse bacteria

Study published at http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17459830
High throughput genotyping is essential for studying the spread of multiple antimicrobial resistance. A test oligonucleotide microarray designed to detect 94 antimicrobial resistance genes was constructed and successfully used to identify antimicrobial resistance genes in control strains. The microarray was then used to assay 51 distantly related bacteria, including Gram-negative and Gram-positive isolates, resulting in the identification of 61 different antimicrobial resistance genes in these bacteria. These results were consistent with their known gene content and resistance phenotypes. Microarray results were confirmed by polymerase chain reaction and Southern blot analysis. These results demonstrate that this approach could be used to construct a microarray to detect all sequenced antimicrobial resistance genes in nearly all bacteria.

Genetically Guided Treatment For Cancer

Two critical characteristics of breast cancer that are important to treatment can be identified by measuring gene expression in the tumor, a research team led by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center reports in Lancet Oncology online.

Researchers developed and validated a new genomic microarray test that identifies whether a tumor’s growth is fueled by the female hormone estrogen and the role of a growth factor receptor known as HER-2 that makes a tumor vulnerable to a specific drug.

“This is one important step towards personalized diagnosis and treatment planning based on an integrated genomic test of an individual tumor,” said senior author W. Fraser Symmans, M.D., associate professor in the M. D. Anderson Department of Pathology.

The Lancet Oncology paper results are the latest in an effort by the research team to develop a single test to quickly and efficiently determine the characteristics and vulnerabilities of a patient’s breast cancer and ultimately to guide treatment.

About 70 percent of breast cancers are estrogen-receptor positive and another 15 to 25 percent are human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2) positive. Each receptor status requires different types of treatment.

“This moves us closer to developing an integrated single genomic test that could estimate the risk of cancer relapse after surgery, determine the ER and HER2 receptor status, and also gauge the sensitivity of the tumor to hormone therapy and chemotherapy,” says Lajos Pusztai, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in the M. D. Anderson Department of Breast Medical Oncology, and team leader with Symmans.

Last fall, the group published a study showing that a genomic microarray test can also predict a patient’s response to chemotherapy. They also presented a paper in December showing that another genomic index predicts how an ER-positive patient will respond to hormonal therapy.

The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and the Goodwin Foundation.

Co-authors with Symmans and Pusztai are: first author Yun Gong, M.D., and Nour Sneige, M.D., of the M. D. Anderson Department of Pathology; Kai Yan, Keith Anderson, and Kenneth Hess, of the M. D. Anderson Department of Biostatistics; Feng Lin, M.D., Vicente Valero, M.D., Daniel Booser, M.D., Jaime Mejia, M.D., and Gabriel Hortobagyi, M.D., of the M. D. Anderson Department of Breast Medical Oncology; Christos Sotiriou, M.D., Ph.D., Institut Jules Bordet, Brussels, Belgium; Fabrice Andre, M.D., of Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; Frankie Holmes, M.D., John Pippen Jr., M.D., and Svetislava Vukelja, M.D., of U.S. Oncology-Texas Oncology; Henry Gomez, M.D., of the Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Neoplasicas, Lima, Peru; and Luis Barajas, M.D., Departmento de Ginecologia Oncologica, Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, Guadalajara, Mexico.

Contact: Scott Merville
University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

A new twist on DNA-dynamic quality of epigenetics

What makes you different from everyone else on the planet may have less to do with the spelling of your genetic code than with a scattering of chemical “tags” that, like censor’s marks, render some of your genes unreadable.The code itself, after all, is 99.9 percent identical in all of us, so these peripheral elements – referred to as epigenetics – offer a plausible reason human beings come in such a variety of shapes and sizes.

As one recent paper suggested, epigenetics can explain why identical twins don’t always look identical, especially as they get older.

There’s a dynamic quality to epigenetics. Over your lifetime new chemical tags can stick to previously active genes, thus turning them off, while tags affixed from birth can occasionally fall off, activating genes that are meant to be disabled. A growing number of researchers are connecting such epigenetic shifts to cancer.

The good news is such changes are potentially reversible, says Frank Rauscher, a professor at the Wistar Institute. “For therapeutics, manipulating the epigenome is the way to go.”

Unlike genetic mutations, which permanently scramble a cell’s genetic code, epigenetic tags leave the underlying code intact.

“The old dogma was that cancer was caused by DNA damage and gene mutations,” says Jean-Pierre Issa, a researcher from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. But a closer look showed that cancer cells accumulate a combination of spelling errors in the DNA and inappropriate or missing epigenetic tags, he says. “This has led to a rethinking of environmental carcinogens and how diet could affect cancer and so on.”

Full article is available at http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/16713996.htm 

NYIT Professor Discovers Next Generation of DNA and RNA Microarrays brings hopes of personalized medicine

A novel invention developed by a scientist from New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) could revolutionize biological and clinical research and may lead to treatments for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and genetic and infectious diseases.

The invention allows the immobilisation of intact. double-stranded, multi-stranded or alternative DNA or RNA and has the potential to revolutionise biological and clinical research by allowing scientists to duplicate the cell environment and experiment with human, bacterial and viral genes.

Since the discovery of DNA, biologists have worked to unlock the secrets of the human cell.

Scientist Dr. Claude E. Gagna, Ph.D., an associate professor at NYIT’s School of Health Professions, Behavioral and Life Sciences, discovered how to immobilize intact double-stranded (ds-), multi-stranded or alternative DNA and RNA on one microarray. This immobilization allows scientists to duplicate the environment of a cell, and study, examine and experiment with human, bacterial and viral genes. This invention provides the methodology to analyze more than 150,000 non-denatured genes.

The “Gagna/NYIT Multi-Stranded and Alternative DNA, RNA and Plasmid Microarray,” has been patented (#6,936,461) in the United States and is pending in Europe and Asia. Gagna’s discovery will help scientists understand how transitions in DNA structure regulate gene expression (B-DNA to Z-DNA), and how DNA-protein, and DNA-drug interactions regulate genes. The breakthrough can aid in genetic screening, clinical diagnosis, forensics, DNA synthesis-sequencing and biodefense.

“This patent represents a leap forward from conventional DNA microarrays that use hybridisation,” said Dr Gagna, associate professor of the New York Institute of Technology.

This will help pharmaceutical companies produce new classes of drugs that target genes, with fewer side effects,” Dr Gagna continued.

“It will lower the cost and increase the speed of drug discovery, saving millions of dollars.”

Since the invention of the DNA microarray in 1991, the technology has become one of the most powerful research tools for drug discovery research allowing scientist to perform thousands of experiments with incredible accuracy and speed. According to MarketResearch.com sales of DNA microarrays are expected to be higher than $5.3bn (€ bn) by 2009.

The technology hinges around a novel surface that increases the adherence of DNA to the microarray so that any type of nucleic acid can be anchored, unlike conventional arrays that allow only single-stranded DNA to be immobilised.

Additionally, Gagna has developed a novel surface that increases the adherence of the DNA to the microarray so that any type of nucleic acid can be anchored. Unlike conventional microarrays, which immobilize single-stranded DNA, scientists will now be able to “secure intact, non-denatured, unaltered ds-DNA, triplex-, quadruplex-, or pentaplex DNA onto the microarray,” says Gagna. “With this technology, one day we will have tailor-made molecular medicine for patients.”

“With this technology, one day we will have tailor-made molecular medicine for patients,” said Dr Gagna.

and sure the news site are buzzing with the discovery

read more about the research and the original article details at

Dr Gagna, associate professor of the New York Institute of Technology. and also at www.nyit.edu/dnamicroarrays

Microarray test to anlyse the role of estrogen in breast cancer

Two critical characteristics of breast cancer that are important to treatment can be identified by measuring gene expression in the tumor, a research team led by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center reports in Lancet Oncology online.

Researchers developed and validated a new genomic microarray test that identifies whether a tumor’s growth is fueled by the female hormone estrogen and the role of a growth factor receptor known as HER-2 that makes a tumor vulnerable to a specific drug. The status of these factors is now determined by pathology tests.

About 70 percent of breast cancers are estrogen-receptor positive and another 15 to 25 percent are human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2) positive. Each receptor status requires different types of treatment.

Read the complete article that talkes about the revolutionary test that promises to chage the way cancer is treated

http://www.huliq.com/11047/er-and-her-2-status-of-breast-tumors