Multiomic approaches for thyroid cancer diagnosis

Thyroid cancer is a common endocrine malignancy; however, its diagnosis is not straightforward. The current gold standard for diagnosing thyroid cancer is fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB), but when cytological analysis does not provide viable results or samples belong to less defined categories of diagnosis, patients are often referred to diagnostic surgery. Given that not all these nodules require removal, nor all of them are malignant, patients would not necessarily require surgery had the initial FNAB diagnosis been more conclusive. There is therefore a lack of reliable and specific biomarkers for thyroid cancer malignancy, that can complement and improve the current diagnosing methods. “Omics” approaches have gained much attention in the last decade in the field of biomarker discovery for diagnostic and prognostic characterization of various pathophysiological conditions. In this project, proteomics and metabolomics approaches were applied to the same thyroid nodules from patients with benign and malignant lesions. Tissue analysis provided several interesting biomarkers by both proteomics and metabolomics. The combination of these results demonstrated the high energetic and biomass demand of cancer cells, as well as a biomarker panel including 2 free peptides and 2 proteins with high sensitivity and specificity. Together, these results have contributed to increasing the knowledge of thyroid cancer phenotype and corresponding biochemical profiles, as well as providing potential biomarkers for malignancy, and improving diagnostic methodologies.