Ficolled bone marrow is superior to bone marrow buffy coat for detection of minimal residual disease in multiple myeloma.

Buffy coat and ficoll of bone marrow (BM) are viable options for the study of minimal residual disease (MRD) in multiple myeloma (MM). As yet, there is no data about the superiority of either sample types. Herein, we aimed to address this issue. Forty pairs of ficolled BMs and BM buffy coats of 19 MM patients were studied for MRD by allele-specific oligonucleotide real-time quantitative PCR, with patient-specific primers/probes whenever appropriate. There were 41 pairs of MRD data for comparison analysis due to one patient with biclonal disease. MRD levels in ficolls and buffy coats were highly concordant ( Taken together, ficolled BM is more sensitive than BM buffy coat for MRD detection in MM, hence should be recommended.