Comperative study of Herceptest and fluorescence in situ hybridization results in breast carcinoma: Indeterminate (2+) group must not be a wide range uncertainty category Y. Saglican * , U. Ince * Acibadem Maslak Hospital, Dept. of Pathology, Istanbul, Turkey Objective: HercepTest is an exclusively used immunohistochemistry method for testing Her2/neu overexpression in breast carcinomas. The purpose of this study is to select the proper patients candidate to in situ hybridization, with an indeterminate Her2 score. Method: A retrospective analysis of 163 cases with invasive breast carcinoma were evaluated for Her2 status using immunohistochemistry and fluorescence in situ hybridization. İmmunohistochemistry of cases that had been previously evaluated by nine different pathologists in our department, were reviewed by two experienced pathologists. Interpretation of the immunohistochemistry results was made without knowing the first results. Results: Compared to the first evaluation; cases with score 0, 1+ and 3+correlated with the review of immunhistochemistry and none of score 0 and 1+ tumors were positive with in situ hybridization. Gene amplification was detected in 43 cases; 23 of them with 2+score. Three of 3+ tumors and 106 of 2+ cases were negative with in situ hybridization. Discordance was detected in 21 cases in 2+ score; 17 of them were reclassified as negative and 4 were technically unsatisfactory. Conclusion: Using a different cut-off value for indeterminate Her2 results and training of pathologists to minimaze the interpretational differences, will maximize the accuracy, while not submitting to unnecessary molecular tests. Objective: The excision repair cross-complementation 1 (ERCC1) enzyme plays an essential role in the nucleotide excision repair pathway and is associated with resistance to platinum-based chemotherapy in different types of cancer. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the clinicopathological significance of ERCC1 expression in breast cancer patients. Method: We used immunohistochemical to analyze ERCC1 expression in a tissue microarray from 135 breast carcinomas. ERCC1 expression analysis was available for 109 cases and was correlated with clinicopathologic factors and outcome data. Results: ERCC1-positive was observed in 58 (53.2 %) cases and was correlated with smaller tumor size (P= 0.007) and with positivity for estrogen receptor (P=0.040). ERCC1 expression did not correlate with overall and disease-free survival rates. The majority (72.7 %) of special histological types of invasive breast carcinomas was positive for ERCC1 compared to invasive ductal carcinomas (ERCC1-positive in 51.1 % of the cases). Similarly, triple negative breast cancers (TNBC) were more frequently negative for ERCC1 (61.5 % of the cases) compared to the non-TNBC (41.5 %). Conclusion: ERCC1 expression correlated significantly with favorable prognostic factors, such as smaller tumor size and ER-positivity, suggesting a possible role for ERCC1 as a predictive and/or prognostic marker in breast cancer.