An immunohistochemical study of potential diagnostic and therapeutic biomarkers of wild type gastrointestinal stromal tumours - Letter to the editor.

We read the article by Wong et al. entitled "An immunohistochemical study of potential diagnostic and therapeutic biomarkers of wild type gastrointestinal stromal tumours", that has been recently published in the February issue 2015. The authors performed an immunohistochemical (IHC) analysis on 27 KIT/PDGFRA WT GIST, using a panel of 5 antibodies (SDHB, IGF1R, HER2, EGFR and BRAF V660E), in order to investigate if they, individually or collectively, may be used as potential biomarkers, and thus considered as potential therapeutic target for KIT/PDGFRA WT GIST 1 . However, as expected, none of these antibodies, either as individual markers or as a panel, has been shown to be highly sensitive and specific for the identification of KIT/PDGFRA WT GIST 1 . On the contrary, they found that both EGFR and IGF1R are expressed by a proportion of KIT/PDGFRA WT GIST and then may be considered as potential therapeutic targets for this subgroup of GIST