RTP On Demand — Head & Neck/Thyroid | Research To PracticeGenomic landscape of anaplastic thyroid cancer
1:32 minutes.
TRANSCRIPTION:
DR COHEN: It’s unfortunately a disease that is almost universally fatal, anaplastic thyroid cancer. And we know so little about it, especially molecularly. And so papers like this one, although it was a small number of patients, I believe it was 12 or 13 patients, but papers like this one are incredibly important, because if we’re going to make any impact on this disease, we need to begin to learn more about it. What was interesting in that paper was that it appears that there’s early genomic split in the development of anaplastic thyroid cancer. We do believe that most anaplastic, if not all anaplastic, thyroid cancers were, at some point, a differentiated thyroid cancer that became more aggressive or split off. And it really does look like, when looking at samples that had evidence of both differentiated and anaplastic, it really looked like that divergence occurred very early. And, as you might guess, the anaplastic took on many more mutations in tumor suppressor genes and, hence, leading to that aggressive phenotype. So biologically very interesting. It did give us some targets to think about, such as PIK3CA and BRAF, but clearly, it’s an area that needs to be enhanced, dramatically, in terms of our knowledge base. |