Diagnostic usefulness of PCR profiling of the differentially expressed marker genes in thyroid papillary carcinomas

The study was set out to determine whether characteristic changes in the gene expression profile in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) discovered by microarray assays can be used for conventional molecular diagnosis. Expression levels of five reported to be overexpressed and three underexpressed genes were examined in PTC and normal human tissues by real-time PCR and semi-quantitative duplex PCR. Stepwise logistic regression analysis, duplex PCR data evaluation with recursive partition machine algorithm and hierarchical cluster analysis identified SFTPB (upregulated) and TFF3 (downregulated) gene combination as most favorable for differential molecular diagnosis of PTC. Sensitivity, specificity and accuracy obtained in a series of histologically characterized thyroid tumor and normal tissue samples were 88.9, 96.7 and 94.9%, respectively. Applicability of the method to fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) samples was demonstrated using a collection of needle washouts. In spite individual thyroid tumor and normal tissues as well as FNAB samples displayed a substantial degree of variability in the expression levels of analyzed genes, simultaneous molecular analysis of a panel of optimal markers allows making a high probability predictive estimate and may be considered as an informative method of preoperative PTC diagnosis.