Immunohistochemical studies from near 100 pairs of PTC tissue and their adjacent non-tumor counterparts further showed that AGRN (<i>n =</i> 98), CTSC (<i>n =</i> 99), ERAP2 (<i>n =</i> 98) and GPNMB (<i>n =</i> 100) were significantly (<i>p</i> < 0.05) overexpressed in PTC and higher expression levels of AGRN and CTSC were also significantly associated with metastasis and poor prognosis of PTC patients.
We confirmed a set of nine genes (HMMR, B4GALT1, SLC16A3, ANGPTL4, EXT1, GPC1, RBCK1, SOD1, and AGRN) that were significantly associated with metastasis and overall survival (OS) in the test series.