abstract |
The present invention relates to prognostic methods which are useful in medicine, particularly cancer chemotherapy. The object of the invention to provide a method for assessing HER2-neu and/or EGFR expression levels in fixed or fixed and paraffin embedded tissues and prognosticate the probable sensitivity of a patient's tumor to treatment with receptor tyrosine kinase targeted chemotherapy by examination of the amount of HER2-neu and/or EGFR mRNA in a patient's tumor cells and comparing it to a predetermined threshold expression level for those genes. More specifically, the invention provides to oligonucleotide primer pairs EGFR and HER2-neu and methods comprising their use for detecting levels of EGFR and HER2-neu mRNA, respectively. |