TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING THE MOLECULAR-BASIS OF THYROID-CANCER

Cancer is a multistep phenomenon and multiple genetic lesions are invo lved in the lesion. This has best been demonstrated in colonic cancer. The authors review their work and that of others highlighting what is known about thyroid cancer. They implicate uns mutations predominantl y in follicular in papillary carcinoma and the tumor suppressor genes p53 and retinoblastoma gene product in all stages of thyroid carcinoma . They find a low rate of ret proto-oncogene rearrangement in the Saud i population (>5%) as compared to elsewhere in the world (20%). They f ind TSH receptor message abundance to be predictive of prognosis in th yroid cancer patients. Lastly, they examine whether the abundance of t he antimetastatic gene nm23 message abundance negatively correlated wi th the tendency of thyroid tumors to metastasize and find that not to be the case in thyroid carcinoma. The study of oncogenes and tumor sup pressor genes in the pathogenesis of thyroid cancer is in its infancy; however, rapid progress is being made in identifying genes participat ing in malignant thyroid cell transformation.