RESEARCH ARTICLE
Letter to the Editor - The BRAF V600E Mutation is Not Present in All Cells of the Primary Melanoma and May Not Be Detected in All Metastatic Sites
Lars Alexander Schneider1, §, Thomas F.E. Barth*, 2, §, Margit Anna Huber1, Thomas Menzel3, Karin Scharffetter-Kochanek1, Dietmar Thal2, Peter Moller2, Ralf Marienfeld2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 7
First Page: 8
Last Page: 10
Publisher ID: TODJ-7-8
DOI: 10.2174/1874372201307010008
Article History:
Received Date: 20/07/2012Revision Received Date: 6/11/2012
Acceptance Date: 7/11/2012
Electronic publication date: 22/2/2013
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The invention of targeted therapy for advanced stage melanoma has made it necessary to perform a mutation analysis of each melanoma case in order to detect the BRAF V600E mutation required for the prescription of selective BRAF inhibitors. In this new clinical context it is important to realize that the tumour seeds may come from different tumour clones and thus not all carry the mutation. We present an illustrative case that shows this phenomenon and discuss the consequences for clinical management in case of possible false negative mutation testing.