The Key Role of Pathology in the Context of Precision Medicine Trials

Abstract

The pathologist’s role in the context of precision medicine integrates samples preparation for nucleic acids extractions together with pathological analysis, a mandatory step before molecular analyses. The morphological and phenotypical diagnosis contributes to the appropriate interpretation of the identified molecular alterations providing the exact nature of the tumor, the tumoral cellularity of the analyzed sample useful to interpret molecular alterations such as alternative allele frequency. In some circumstances, genomic alterations require to be validated at the protein level using immunohistochemistry expression.