Assessment of the effect of trastuzumab in the treatment of patients with esophageal adenocarcinoma overexpressing HER2 is limited by the small number of patients in this study.
ERBB2 was the most frequently amplified proto-oncogene among 25 esophageal adenocarcinoma tumors tested (greater than 10-fold amplification in 3 of 25 (12%) tumors tested).
We applied our approach to HER-2/neu quantitative gene expression analysis in 54 microdissected tumor and nonneoplastic archival samples from patients with Barrett's esophageal adenocarcinoma and showed that the results matched those obtained in parallel by fluorescence in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry.