Letter

Luminal B breast tumors are not HER2 positive – authors' response

Rulla M Tamimi^1,2 , Stuart J Schnitt³ , Graham A Colditz^2,4 and Laura C Collins³

¹  Channing Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 181 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA

²  Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA

³  Department of Pathology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA

⁴  Department of Surgery, Washington University School of Medicine, 660 S. Euclid Avenue, St Louis, MO 63110, USA

author email corresponding author email

Breast Cancer Research 2008, 10:405doi:10.1186/bcr2141

Published:	26 September 2008

See related research article by Tamimi et al., http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/10/4/R67 and related letter by Bhargava and Dabbs, http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/10/5/404

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

The letter from Drs Bhargava and Dabbs [1] expressed concern with the immunohistochemical (IHC) criteria we used to define breast cancer molecular phenotypes in our study [2]. Although expression arrays are the 'gold standard' for defining these subtypes, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the markers we selected provide a reasonable approximation of molecular phenotypes, as determined by gene expression profiling. For a large study such as ours, in which we collected more than 2,800 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue samples from cancers occurring over a 20-year period, logistical and technical issues precluded the feasibility of our conducting expression array analyses. The obvious limitation of using IHC markers to define subtypes is that this may result in the misclassification of some tumors.