Endocrine Abstracts

Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy giving rise to one of the most indolent solid cancers, but also one of the most lethal. In recent years, systematic studies of the cancer genome, most importantly those derived from The Cancer Genome Altas (TCGA), have catalogued aberrations in the DNA, chromatin, and RNA of the genomes of thousands of tumors relative to matched normal cellular genomes and have analyzed their epigenetic and protein consequences. One unexpected observation is that the genome is massively transcribed in non-coding RNA which role is now beginning to be understood. We now know that the alteration of the transcriptome is not restricted to the production of aberrant levels of protein-coding RNAs (less than 2% of the genome) but also refers to the aberrant expression of multiple noncoding members that comprise the human genome, being microRNAs the most studied and, more recently, long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). Moreover, the interplay between lncRNAs and microRNAs appears to be a new level of regulation of importance in several malignancies. Cancer genomics is therefore providing new information on cancer development and behavior, as well as new insights into genetic alterations and molecular pathways. From this genomic perspective, we will review the main advances concerning some essential aspects of the molecular pathogenesis of thyroid cancer focusing on the increasing role of non-coding RNAs. This look across these genomic and cellular alterations results in the reshaping of the multistep model of thyroid tumors development and offers new tools and opportunities for further research and clinical development of novel treatment strategies.