Several drugs targeting RET have been approved by the FDA for the treatment of cancer: (i) cabozantinib and vandetanib for medullary thyroid carcinomas and (ii) lenvatinib and sorafenib for differentiated thyroid cancers.
In addition, persistent/recurrent TC was seen in 8/12 (66.7%) pediatric patients harboring the BRAF(V600E) mutation versus 14/41 (34.1%) patients harboring the wild type BRAF (p = 0.05), and when only conventional papillary TC was examined, in 7/9 (77.8%) cases harboring BRAF(V600E) mutation versus 11/33 (33.3%) cases harboring wild type BRAF (p = 0.025).
The posttest probability of thyroid cancer was 100% for nodules positive for BRAF or RET-PTC, 70% for RAS or PAX8-PPARG, and 88% for molecular cytology overall.
We examined the expression of feedback regulation mechanisms and alterations in the upper signal transduction pathway in thyroid cancer cell lines harboring BRAF mutation.
The effect of activating somatic mutations in the KRAS and BRAF genes on the responsiveness to sunitinib was evaluated in a panel of thyroid cancer cell lines harboring wild-type KRAS and BRAF genes, the RET/PTC1 rearrangement, the G12R KRAS, or the V600E BRAF mutation.
Evidence has also shown that the detection of the BRAF(V600E) mutation in cancer is crucial in order to identify novel avenues for thyroid cancer treatment.Based on the BRAF kinase structure, novel drugs can potentially be designed to target oncogenic BRAF in cancer therapeutics.
BRAF is a major oncoprotein and oncogenic mutations in BRAF are found in a significant number of cancers, including melanoma, thyroid cancer, colorectal cancer and others.
The rearranged during transfection/papillary thyroid carcinoma (RET/PTC) tyrosine kinase is an oncogene implicated in the tumorigenesis of thyroid cancer.
We performed Sanger sequencing to detect BRAFV600E and TERT promoter mutations and both immunohistochemistry and fluorescence in situ hybridization to identify ALK rearrangement on 243 thyroid cancers.
We conclude that both mutational events as well as over-expression of BRAF gene is highly implicated in pathogenesis of thyroid cancer and the BRAF protein over-expression is independent of the BRAF mutational status of thyroid cancer patients.
The posttest probability of thyroid cancer was 100% for nodules positive for BRAF or RET-PTC, 70% for RAS or PAX8-PPARG, and 88% for molecular cytology overall.
The BM probe not only enabled sensitive detection of two types of EGFR-associated point mutations located in GC-rich regions, but also successfully identified the BRAFV600E mutation in the serum from a thyroid cancer patient which could not be detected by the conventional sequencing method.