Papillary thyroid carcinomas in humans are associated with the ret/PTC oncogene and, following loss of p53 function, may progress to anaplastic carcinomas.
All thyroid specimens, in addition to histological and immunohistological examinations, were also specifically studied for activation of the RET-PTC oncogene, that seems to be restricted to papillary thyroid carcinoma.
Although ret/PTC rearrangements have been identified in both spontaneous and radiation-induced papillary thyroid cancer, they seem more frequent among radiation-associated tumors.
Although the cause of the high frequency of RET/PTC oncogenes in Chinese papillary thyroid carcinomas is unknown, our study suggests that RET rearrangement is an important genetic lesion underlying the development of thyroid papillary carcinoma in Taiwan.
Among 73 PTC patients with sufficient tissue available for FISH and multiplex qPCR, 10 cases were defined as RET/PTC positive by both assays, including eight CCDC6/RET and two NCOA4/RET fusions with relatively high RET mRNA.
BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate the expression of the BRAF V600E gene mutation and the RET/PTC gene rearrangement in the progression of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) in 50 patients from Inner Mongolia.
Because RET/PTC gene rearrangements are specific to papillary thyroid carcinoma, the authors examined the presence of RET/PTC-1, -2, and -3 in eight hyalinizing trabecular tumors using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction with Southern hybridization and immunohistochemistry.
Comparing the cytological or, when performed, histological diagnoses with the results of FNAB-Tg, we found that in 24 cases of lymph node metastases from PTC (19 lymph nodes from patients at the first diagnoses and 5 lymph nodes from PTC patients in follow up) the mean level of Thyroglobulin was 1840.11 ng/ml; range: <0,2 to 11440 ng/ml.
Discovering the mechanism of PTC genesis and progression and finding new potential diagnostic biomarkers/therapeutic target genes of PTC are of great significance.
Each case had a previous fine-needle aspiration diagnosis classified according to the British Thyroid Association Guidelines categorized as inadequate (Thy1) (n = 19), benign (Thy2) (n = 19), follicular lesion and follicular lesion with atypia (Thy3) (n = 109), suspicious of PTC (Thy4) (n = 29), or malignant (Thy5) (n = 11).
Expression analysis of ANKRD26 and RET was performed for the tumor harboring ANKRD26-RET, for corresponding normal thyroid tissue and PTC tumors with representative genetic alterations (BRAFV600E, CCDC6-RET), complemented by a comparative search in the "UniProt" database.
Finally, we applied our FISH approach to determine the extent of deletion involving this locus (D10S170) in a papillary thyroid cancer cell line, TPC-1.
Following identification of RET, it was found that somatic rearrangements of this gene, conventionally designated as RET/PTC, are frequently present in papillary thyroid carcinoma.