This Week in Modern Pathology

Researchers led by Marie-Christine Jacob at Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France, describe their assessment of using multiparametric flow cytometry to detect and characterize the immunophenotype of peripheral T-cell lymphoma. As they report in Modern Pathology, the researchers examined 30 peripheral T-cell lymphoma biopsies and 94 control biopsies from lymphoid tissues and found that using multiparametric flow cytometry to analyze the samples' CR-Vβ repertoire was a "highly specific and sensitive technique for peripheral T-cell lymphoma diagnosis when combined with conventional approaches."

Washington University in St. Louis' Samir El-Mofty and his colleagues report in Modern Pathology that p16 immunostaining patterns in oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma correlate with the tumors' human papilloma virus RNA status. El-Mofty and his colleagues studied oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma samples that were partially p16-positive, and found that samples that are more than half stained have transcriptionally active HPV. Additionally, they report that HPV-positive samples have large swaths of confluent staining. This, the researchers say, supports a 70 percent or 75 percent p16 staining cutoff for HPV positivity, or a 50 percent p16 staining cutoff if the staining has more than 25 percent confluence.