Advanced kidney cancer is treated by targeted therapies with antiangiogenic agents. However, not all patients will benefit from this treatment and therefore patients can be divided into two groups: responders and non-responders.
It is of interest to define the differences between these two groups. One of the differences that are examined is the degree of maturity of the microvessels. For this purpose the vessel markers CD31 and CD34 are used. Since CD31 is a marker for mature vessels, CD34 positivity in the absence of CD31 can be used to identify more immature vessels.
The purpose of this APP is to quantify the CD31 positive areas, CD34 positive areas, and overlapping positive areas to investigate if the ratio of mature to immature vessels is one of the differences between the responder and non-responder groups.
From a TMA block, sequential slides were obtained and each slide was stained with either CD31 or CD34 (see FIGURE 1). Using the patented Autodisector technology, the two sequential slides can be overlaid (see FIGURE 2) and each TMA core-pair is automatically aligned at a high magnification, cell-to-cell level, to facilitate the detection of overlapping positive stain between the two slides (see FIGURE 7).
Note: To obtain satisfying results from this technology it is crucial that the sequential slides are taken with as small a distance between them as possible. This technology can be applied to both TMAs and whole tissue sections. When used with TMAs or other small tissue sections, tissue folds and other artifacts must be kept at an absolute minimum to obtain good alignment results.