The future role of pathological assessment of clinical breast cancer cases will be focused increasingly on stratification aiming to improve personalisation of care for breast cancer patients. It is now widely accepted that more information can be gleaned from the morphological appearance / phenotype of a tumour and that this may be used to predict the biological behaviour and clinical outcome in many malignancies, including breast cancer. In addition, the applicability of advanced techniques, such as immunohistochemistry and more recenlty molecular examination, has been expanded in the search for features of the tumour which can predict reliably not only the prognosis of the patient but also the potential for response to a given treatment.