FISH in cancer diagnosis and prognostication: from cause to course of disease.

The last 20 years have witnessed an astounding evolution of cytogenetic approaches to cancer diagnosis and prognostication. Molecular techniques and, in particular, nonisotopically-labeled nucleic acid probes and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH)-based techniques have replaced the costly and potentially dangerous radioactive techniques used in research and the clinical detection of genetic alterations in tumor cells. Fluorescent DNA probes also enabled the screening for very subtle chromosomal changes. Clinical laboratories now choose from a growing number of FISH-based cytogenetic tests to support physician's diagnoses of the causes and the course of a disease. Depending on the specimen, state-of-the-art FISH techniques allow the localization and scoring of 10-24 different targets and overcome previous problems associated with target colocalization and detection system bandwidth. FISH-based analyses have been applied very successfully to the analysis of single cells and have demonstrated the existence of cell clones of different chromosomal make-up within human tumors. This information provides disease-specific information to the attending physician and should enable the design of patient-specific protocols for disease intervention.