Quantitative microimmunohistochemistry (QµIC)

Abstract

Determination of protein expression status in a tumor biopsy is critical for proper treatment choice. However, the current method to determine biomarker status, immunohistochemistry, is semi-quantitative, which can lead to ambiguous results, and has lab-to-lab variability. We present here a novel method that facilitates an objective and standardized quantification of a biomarker on a tissue, which we term quantitative microimmunohistochemistry (qµIC). We extract kinetic information and subsequently the time values for a chosen set of angles, a metric we term saturation approach matrix. As a confirmation of our metric, we performed a blinded test showing concordance with a pathologist score.