Breast metastasis in a young pregnant woman affected by metastatic melanoma.

Metastasis to the breast from extramammary tumors are rare, and the most common cancer that metastasizes to this site is malignant melanoma (MM). Unfortunately, metastases from malignant melanoma reveal a widespread of the disease and a high likeliness of poor diagnosis. In this study, a case of left breast metastasis of MM in a young pregnant woman, with a fast progression of the mammary and systemic course of pathology and unfortunately poor prognosis is presented. Despite the role of pregnancy in MM has yet to be unraveled, our study encourages the theory that immunosuppression and hormonal changes due to pregnancy may aggravate melanoma prognosis.

Analytical Assessment of the Vela Diagnostics NGS Assay for HIV Genotyping and Resistance Testing: The Apulian Experience.

Drug-resistance monitoring is one of the hardest challenges in HIV management. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies speed up the detection of drug resistance, allowing the adjustment of antiretroviral therapy and enhancing the quality of life of people living with HIV. Recently, the NGS Sentosa® SQ HIV Genotyping Assay (Vela Diagnostics) received approval for in vitro diagnostics use. This work is the first Italian evaluation of the performance of the Vela Diagnostics NGS platform, assessed with 420 HIV-1 clinical samples. A comparison with Sanger sequencing performance is also reported, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the Sentosa® NGS assay. The precision of the technology was studied with reference specimens, while intra- and inter-assay reproducibility were evaluated for selected clinical samples. Vela Diagnostics' NGS assay reached an 87% success rate through 30 runs of analysis in a real-world clinical context. The concordance with Sanger sequencing outcomes was equal to 97.2%. Several detected mismatches were due to NGS's superior sensitivity to low-frequency variants. A high accuracy was observed in testing reference samples. Repeatability and reproducibility assays highlighted the good performance of the NGS platform. Beyond a few technical issues that call for further optimization, the key improvement will be a better balance between costs and processing speed. Once these issues have been solved, the Sentosa® SQ HIV Genotyping Assay will be the way forward for HIV resistance testing.