ABSTRACT
Mortality from breast cancer results from the ability of some tumors to metastasize to distant sites. Selecting patients with micrometastases at diagnosis is crucial for clinicians in deciding who should, and who should not, receive toxic and expensive adjuvant chemotherapy to eradicate these metastatic cells. In addition, the management of breast cancer has changed, with the majority of node-negative patients now undergoing systemic adjuvant therapy because we cannot precisely determine an individual’s risk of recurrence. Laser capture microdissection has also been successfully used to isolate pure-cell populations from primary breast cancers for array profiling. D. C Sgroi et al. utilized laser capture microdissection to isolate morphologically “normal” breast epithelial cells, invasive breast cancer cells, and metastatic lymph node cancer cells from one patient and were able to demonstrate the feasibility of using microdissected samples for array profiling as well as following potential progression of cancer in this patient.
