RTP On Demand — Head & Neck/Thyroid | Research To PracticeBiology of medullary thyroid cancer
1:23 minutes.
TRANSCRIPTION:
DR LOVE: So let’s talk a little bit, go through a few slides related to medullary cancer and the science of this disease. Maybe you can comment a little bit about the biology. DR COHEN: Right. And again, it’s a disease where ironically we’ve known a lot more about the biology versus having therapies that we could administer. We know that some patients with medullary thyroid cancer have the disease secondary to a heredity syndrome. These are well-described syndromes, multiple endocrine neoplasia 1 and 2, or familial hereditary medullary thyroid cancer. And those patients universally have a mutation in RET, R-E-T. That only accounts for about a quarter of the disease. Most of the patients who we see with medullary thyroid cancer have sporadic. Interestingly, most of those patients also have RET mutations, about two thirds to maybe a little bit higher than that, maybe about 70%. And so RET clearly plays an important role in the biology of this disease. DR LOVE: What do we know about RET? DR COHEN: We know that RET, when mutated, is an activating mutation. We know that certainly for medullary thyroid cancer, it’s a driving mutation. And it’s critical to the carcinogenesis and the propagation of the disease. The same is probably true of non-small cell lung cancers with RET mutations. And so RET became a viable target in medullary thyroid cancer.
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