Immunohistochemical detection of the BRAF V600E mutation in melanoma patients with monoclonal antibody VE1.

A novel mutation-specific monoclonal antibody VE1 was generated to detect BRAF V600E mutation with immunohistochemistry. This study aims to investigate the sensitivity and specificity of immunohistochemistry compared with conventional Sanger sequencing and to evaluate whether IHC would become the routine screening method of BRAF V600E mutation. A total of 84 cases of melanoma lesion specimens were selected to make the tissue microarray and to perform IHC with VE1 antibody. Simultaneously Sanger sequencing was applied to test and verify. VE1 has a high specificity (100%) and sensitivity (72.2%), and the concordance between the two techniques is excellent (93.8% cases coherent and kappa = 0.801). As a rapid, cost-effective method, IHC may become the routine diagnostic means for the detection of BRAF V600E mutation of malignant melanomas in the near future, and the recommended detection process is initial immunohistochemical staining for positive cases, followed by molecular techniques for negative or ambiguous cases.