Im trying to stain tissue samples (paraffin embedded) to see whether normal bronchial epithelial cells surround a lung tumor. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Using IHC, positive or stronger staining of CK5 may be a good marker to tell the lung squamous cell carcinoma, and positive or stronger staining of CK7 may be good marker to tell the lung adenocarcinoma.
You could consider Ki67 positive cells as proliferating cells, and therefore cancer cells. Ki67 labels cells in phases G1, S, and G2 of the mitosis. The mouse monoclonal antibody from Dako works well in paraffin-embedded sections at 1/100 dilution in my hands.
In lung adenocarcinoma cases, p63 should be negative in cancer cells, while the basal cell layer of surrounding bronchial epithelium is strongly positive. In squamous cell carcinoma cases, the differentiation between malignant epithelium and surrounding bronchial epithelium may be impossible, or maybe possible with mucin ICH. Ki-67 (previously suggested) is not good discriminator in this setting, because the basal cell layer of bronchial epithelium also shows higher proliferative activity.