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The authors studied prognostic factors in 77 patients with primary cystosarcoma phyllodes (CSP) of the breast. Median patient age was 50 years of age, and the median follow‐up time was 8 years. Sixteen patients (21%) had distant metastases and subsequently died of CSP. Clinical variables such as age, symptom duration, clinical tumor size, and type of surgery were not of prognostic value. Local recurrence was more common among patients treated with breast‐conserving surgery than among those treated with mastectomy. However, there was no significant difference between these two subgroups in terms of distant metastasis‐free survival or overall survival. The prognostic significance of several histopathologic parameters was also assessed, e.g., stromal cellularity, stromal cellular atypism, mitotic activity, atypic mitoses, stromal overgrowth, tumor contour, tumor necrosis, and heterologous stromal elements. In a multivariate Cox analysis, the only features that were found to be independent prognostic factors were tumor necrosis (P < 0.05) and presence of stromal elements other than fibromyxoid tissue (P < 0.01). In summary, additional studies of prognostic factors in CSP are warranted because of the conflicting results in published reports.

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Ovarian cancer is usually found at a late stage when the prognosis is often bad. Relative survival rates decrease with tumor stage or grade, and the 5-year survival rate for women with carcinoma is only 38%. Thus, there is a great need to find biomarkers that can be used to carry out routine screening, especially in high-risk patient groups. Here, we present a large-scale study of 64 tissue samples taken from patients at all stages and show that we can identify statistically valid markers using nonsupervised methods that distinguish between normal, benign, borderline, and malignant tissue. We have identified 217 of the significantly changing protein spots. We are expressing and raising antibodies to 35 of these. Currently, we have validated 5 of these antibodies for use in immunohistochemical analysis using tissue microarrays of healthy and diseased ovarian, as well as other, human tissues.