GSE40807

• The aim of this study was to identify the miRNA expression profile of a large cohort of paired tumor and normal tissue of MTC patients (62 cases), and to investigate miRNA targets that may be important for cancer theragnosis. 

• Thyroid carcinomas are the most common cancer of the endocrine system.
• Among these tumors, medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) is a rare calcitonin-producing tumor, which arises from thyroid gland parafollicular C cells and accounts for 3-8% of all thyroid carcinomas.
• Most cases of MTC are sporadic (SMTC), whereas the remaining cases are due to hereditary forms (HMTC) caused by germline activating mutations of the RET protooncogene. 
• Somatic RET gene mutations can also be found in 40-50% of SMTC.

• Surgery is the treatment of choice for MTC, consisting in total thyroidectomy and lymph node dissection. However, despite surgery, 50% of patients with MTC relapse.

• Metastatic and refractory MTC are relatively unresponsive to radiation therapy and to standard chemotherapeutic regimens. 
• Recently, multi-kinase inhibitors have been tested for treatment of advanced MTC [8]. In particular, vandetanib has been recently approved for treatment of patients with recurrent or metastatic unresectable MTC.

• A classification model has been built using Trainset. The selected probes were:
  1. hsa-mir-410
  2. hsa-mir-551b

• The model has been tested using Testset.