QUANTITATION OF ESTROGEN RECEPTOR CONCENTRATION IN CELLS

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The objective of this project is to develop quantitative estrogen receptor concentration measurements using high resolution digital image microscopy techniques. These techniques will enable direct measurements of receptor concentration in tissue and cells. This is an improvement over the current biochemical assays which only give an average value for receptor concentration in a homogenized specimen sample which may contain varying proportions of malignant cells. The assay proposed will 1) measure the concentration of receptors in cell populations, 2) the proportion of cells in a tumor population that have estrogen receptor above a certain concentration level. The recent development of monoclonal antibodies against estrogen receptors makes the development of methods for immunocytochemical localization of estrogen receptors feasible. Additional recent advances in quantitative imaging cytology can be combined with this to develop a fast, efficient and more accurate assay method and to eliminate the visual subjective components of the method. This combination of these new techniques to produce a new quantitative assay is particularly important since it has already been shown that patients whose tumors contain estrogen receptors will have a higher probability of responding to hormonal therapy, and seem to have a better prognosis than patients whose tumors do not contain this receptor.