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
1 Skin Cancer Center Ulm, University Department of Dermatology and Allergology Ulm, Germany
2 Department of Pathology and Neuropathology, University of Ulm, Germany
3 Dermatopathologie Friedrichshafen, D-88048 Friedrichshafen Bodensee, Germany


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Creative Commons License
© 2013 Schneider et al.

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.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Institute of Pathology, Ulm University, Ulm, Albert-Einstein- Allee 11, D89081 Ulm, University of Ulm, D-89081 Ulm, Germany; Tel: 0049 731500-56340; Fax: 0049 731500- 56380; E-mail: thomas.barth@uniklinik-ulm.de
# These authors contributed equally.


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.

Keywords: Melanoma, BRAF V600E, mutation analysis, PCR, polyclonality.