IMMUNOHISTOCHEMICAL DETECTION OF MUTANT P53 PROTEIN IN EPITHELIAL OVARIAN-CANCER USING POLYCLONAL ANTIBODY CMI - CORRELATION WITH HISTOPATHOLOGY AND CLINICAL-FEATURES

Approximately 30-50% of cases of ovarian adenocarcinoma harbour mutati ons in the p53 tumour-suppressor gene associated with elevated levels of the protein detected by immunohistochemical staining. To investigat e any relation between the presence of mutant p53 and clinicopathologi cal features of disease, we examined a series of 50 cases of epithelia l ovarian adenocarcinoma for expression of p53 by immunohistological s taining on fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue sections using the polyclon al antibody CMI, and by direct nucleotide sequencing of polymerase cha in reaction-amplified DNA from selected cases. Of the 50 cases examine d, 28 (56%) were p53 positive and there was no significant correlation between p53 status and differentiation stage, clinical (FIGO) stage, multidrug resistance (mdr-l P-glycoprotein) expression or response to treatment. However, we observed a statistically significant difference between the high prevalence of p53-positive serous tumours (18 out of 23) and the lower prevalence of p53-positive cases in mucinous tumour s (3 of 12) suggesting that factors related to disease aetiology, asso ciated with these histological subtypes, may determine the prevalence of functional inactivation of the p53 tumour-suppressor gene in ovaria n adenocarcinoma.