Expression of class III beta-tubulin in malignant epithelial tumours: an immunohistochemical study using TU-20 and TuJ-1 antibodies
Abstract
This study attempts to compare the immunostaining features of two different mouse monoclonal antibodies TU-20 and TuJ-1, both detecting class III β-tubulin, in a group of twenty bioptically evaluated carcinomas of various sites. The proposal that class III β-tubulin expression can correlate with the degree of tumour differentiation and thus could be potentially used as predictive marker of prognosis has been previously done; one of aims of our study was to confirm this hypothesis.
Our results showed that both TuJ-1 and TU-20 antibodies displayed similar immunostaining profile and pattern within individual tumours. Surprisingly, we discovered that only 50% of tumours included in our group showed expression of class III β-tubulin, however, positive immunoreaction did not correspond with the degree of differentiation of individual tumours.
In our group of carcinomas, the class III β-tubulin positivity was not related to the tumour site, histologic type of tumour or its grade.