Molecular stratification of melanoma and the high burden of mutations

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Published: 22 Nov 2018
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Dr Joan Anton Puig Butille - Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Dr Joan Anton Puig Butillé speaks with ecancer at the EADO 2018 congress in Barcelona about the molecular stratification of melanoma and that the disease has a high burden of mutations.

Dr Puig Butillé explains molecular characterisation using NGS sequencing found that there are distant subsets of melanoma in addition to this high burden.

He states that this can be useful to decipher which patients will respond well to different treatments.

ecancer's filming has been kindly supported by Amgen through the ecancer Global Foundation. ecancer is editorially independent and there is no influence over content.

Molecular stratification of melanoma based on NRAS and BRAF has been useful to apply especially for targeted therapies. However, these patients have a resistance to this treatment and the clinical benefit is limited. Most recently molecular characterisation based on NGS sequencing has revealed that there are distinct subsets of melanoma, in addition that melanoma has a high burden of mutation. This information can be useful to detect those melanoma patients that respond to immunotherapy and, in addition, analysis of molecular alterations such as BRAF mutations in circulating free DNA from blood can help us to detect and to monitor the signs of a treatment response. In order to achieve a good personalised medicine in melanoma it is necessary to apply these kinds of molecular genomic strategies.