Deep sequencing of KIT, MET, PIK3CA, and PTEN hotspots in papillary thyroid carcinomas with distant metastases.

Well-differentiated papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) accounts for w90% of all thyroid cancers. While the majority of these tumors tend to behave as indolent lesions, a fraction of PTCs is highly aggressive and results in disseminated systemic spread to distant sites. Numerous studies attempted to define the prognostic markers able to discriminate at diagnosis PTCs with more aggressive behavior fromthose with an indolent course. Nonetheless, the usefulness of genetic analysis in PTC patient management is still controversial, probably due to the fact that our knowledge about the genetic asset of aggressive PTCs is still very limited. The low occurrence of distant metastases and death among the overall PTC cases, and hence the difficulty in collecting large cohorts of PTCs that developed distant metastases (DM-PTCs), has been an important limitation for studies that attempted to correlate genetic alterations with prognosis and outcome of PTC patient