Gene Expression Analysis of Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma with Lymph Node Metastasis and Radioactive Iodine Refractive

Radioiodine therapy (RAI) is a safe and effective treatment for DTC. It significantly increases the life expectancy of DTC patients. However, 60% of patients with recurrent or distant metastatic PTC will be radioiodine refractory (RAI-R), where 131I uptake does not occur. Patients with RAI-R thyroid cancer have a poor outcome, with a 5-year disease-specific survival rate of 60% to 70%. Therefore, resensitization of RAI-R tumours to RAI has the potential to improve survival for DTC patients. Therefore, we used the Agilent One-Colour SurePrint G3 Human Gene Expression V3 Microarray on primary thyroid tumours of 5 PTC patients with negative LN and RAI-avid, 5 PTC patients with positive LN and non-RAI-avid and 4 adjacent normal thyroid tissues to identify potential genes involved in iodine uptake. The extracted microarray data was analysed using AltAnalyze and NetworkAnalyst software to determine differentially expressed probesets. We used p-value < 0.05 and log2 fold change ≥1 or ≤-1 as the criteria for chosen significantly differentially probesets. Then, we used ShinyGo to annotate the probesets, determine gene type, and distribution analysis. We also used FunRich to make VennDiagram. 5 tumor fresh frozen thyroid tissues were collected from PTC patients with no lymph node metastasis and RAI-avid, 5 tumor fresh frozen thyroid tissues were collected from PTC patients with lymph node metastasis and RAI refractive and 4 adjacent normal fresh frozen thyroid tissues were acquired from the Hospital Canselor Tuanku Muhriz UKM (HCTM).