Thyroid Cancer Research Group (TCRG)

           Thyroid carcinoma is the second most common malignancy arising in Saudi Arabian women. The reason for this observed prevalence is not thoroughly understood. As thyroid carcinoma is a polygenetic disease, many genetic factors might influence its onset and progression. This polygenetic feature has limited our understanding of the tumor biology of thyroid carcinoma. While a subset of tumors in different histological types are affected by mutations or rearrangements leading to either constitutively activated genes or to fusion genes that trigger downstream activating events, a considerable number of cases obviously shows no aberrations in known thyroid cancer susceptibility genes.

            On the other hand, there are frequent dilemmas faced by pathologists when dealing with thyroid lesions. The current diagnostic 'gold standard' in thyroid pathology is the routine evaluation using Hematoxylin and Eosin (H & E) stains by expert pathologists. Among the dilemmas is the differential diagnosis of encapsulated, follicular-patterned tumors with less-than-typical nuclei and equivocal signs of invasiveness, which includes the discrimination between, dominant nodule of nodular hyperplasia, follicular adenoma, minimally invasive FTC, and the follicular variant of PTC. Therefore, our overall goal is to discover new molecular biomarkers suitable to help the clinicians in thyroid cancer validation.