3ʳᵈ Edition of the Cancer R&D World Conference 2027

Abstract

According to the American Cancer Society, thyroid cancer in the US has an incidence rate of 13.8 per 100,000 age-adjusted 2000 US population, with women accounting for more than 70% of the new cases. Fortunately, the death rate is only 0.5 per 100,000. The WHO reported 586K new cases and 43.6K deaths from thyroid cancer worldwide in 2020. Mortality from thyroid cancer is higher worldwide compared to countries with a high or very high Human Development Index. Differentiated thyroid cancer (including papillary thyroid cancer, PTC) accounts for more than 90% of cases, and the prognosis is mostly excellent. However, PTC consists of many subtypes, some of which do not respond to traditional treatment. I-131 Radioactive Iodine (RAI) therapy is commonly used for thyroid tumors that are RAI avid, that is, are highly differentiated to behave like normal thyroid. However, identifying patients that are not likely to respond to RAI therapy and therefore experience very poor survival is critical to improving outcomes in this subset of patients. The aggressiveness of thyroid tumors is highly dependent on the genetic and molecular mutations in certain proteins and cellular pathways, which induce the cells to de-differentiate, resulting in a loss of RAI avidity. RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) has developed to the state that it has become a practical tool to measure the RNA expression of key genetic markers to diagnose cancer type and direct therapy. The Thyroid Differentiation Score (TDS) was introduced by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project in 2015 and has been employed by numerous groups to predict PTC outcomes. However, the calculation of TDS requires a large population because the TDS is a measure of the distance from the median expression in the thyroid cancer population. The current study provides an analysis of patients in which RNA-Seq from paired normal and tumor tissue is available and provides greater insight into the use of the TDS as a diagnostic tool and proposes an improved TDS for PTC prognosis and treatment planning.