• Breast cancer

Since the introduction of mandatory HER2 assessment of all newly diagnosed breast carcinomas in 2005, the debate as to the most appropriate method for this testing has continued.1 We, and others, have shown that chromogenic in situ hybridisation (CISH) is a robust and reliable method for HER2 assessment and is very accurate when compared with the ‘gold standard’ fluorescent in situ hybridisation (FISH).2–4 CISH is a single-probe brightfield gene-based assay that uses a more straightforward scoring assessment based on an evaluation of the hybridisation pattern rather than a detailed enumeration of the signals in individual tumour cells. Recently the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved CISH for use in diagnostic HER2 assessment. The year 2007 saw the release onto the market of the silver in situ hybridisation (SISH) assay, which is an automated chromogenic …