Immunocytochemical assays for phosphorylated Akt, specific phosphorylated IGF-IR (Y1316), nuclear Ki-67 and total erbB3 were also performed as previously described on the 50 primary ER+ breast tumours [6,30,41], and the clinicopathological parameters for the clinical set of these tumours are given in Additional file 1, Table S1. Here, ERBB3 is linked to breast neoplasm.