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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2020
The presence of estrogen and progesterone receptors on human breast carcinomas correlates with both response to hormonal therapy and survival. Quantitation of receptor activity is typically performed by radioreceptor assay on fresh frozen tumor tissue obtained at the time of surgical resection. Estrogen and progesterone receptor reactivity can also be detected immunohistochemically on frozen sections of breast cancer and in appropriately fixed paraffin embedded tissues. Several studies have shown that semi-quantitative visual determination and quantitative image analysis assessment of estrogen and progesterone receptor immunoreactivity on fixed tissue sections is highly correlated with biochemical measurements of receptor in frozen samples. We recently developed a procedure for the simultaneous localization and quantitation of antigens in fixed tissue samples that does not involve antigen extraction, radioactive materials, or image analysis. In this procedure, which we term a “Midwestern assay”, fixed tissue sections are used with antigen-specific enzyme-linked antibodies to generate soluble reaction products which are spectrophotometrically quantitatable, as in an ELISA, and deposited reaction products which are microscopically localizable, as in enzyme-based immunohistochemistry.