Extracellular vesicles or free circulating DNA: where to search for BRAF and cKIT mutations?

Our pilot study show that majority of mutated alleles of BRAF and cKIT oncogenes in sera of patients with systemic aggressive mastocytosis and stage IV melanoma is detectable as free circulating (fc) tumor DNA. Although extracellular vesicles (EV) contain significantly higher amount of total DNA, approximately 10-fold lower copy numbers of BRAFV600E and cKITD816V were detected in EV compared to the EV-depleted fc fraction from the same patient.128