The somatic mutational landscape of thyroid cancer in patients with germline PTEN mutations

PTEN hamartoma tumor syndrome (PHTS) is associated with a high rate of thyroid cancer and benign thyroid disease, yet nothing is known of the genomic landscape of PHTS-associated thyroid tumors. In this study, exome sequencing was performed on 58 thyroid tumors (28 cancers, 30 benign nodules) from 19 patients with PHTS, sequenced in tumor-normal pairs. Somatic variant calling was utilized to determine the somatic mutational landscape of thyroid tumors in this population. This was then compared to the known mutational landscape of sporadic thyroid cancer in the general population using sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas. The primary finding of the study was that PHTS-associated thyroid tumors had a unique genomic landscape, including a high frequency of second-hit somatic PTEN... (for more see dbGaP study page.)