Investigating Utility of ctDNA and Tumour Evolution in Advanced Thyroid Cancer

Overview

Although most thyroid cancers are treated and cured successfully there are still 30% who recur after many years. This will eventually progress and at this point may become incurable with treatment options including complex and high risk surgery. The overall efficacy of systemic treatment in advanced thyroid cancer has a good initial response in most patients but not all. The study will collect tissues and blood samples for various protein analysis, nucleic acid extraction and live cell analysis in order to try and detect the presence of plasma ctDNA at baseline of eligible patients.

The treatment decisions are based on relying on radiological parameters such as using the RECIST criteria and measuring the rise in certain serum tumour biomarkers. However, the disadvantage of this is that this method can take many months to detect a change in disease volume. An improved understanding of genetics and cancer and potential gene sequencing can help achieve personalised treatment for patients. However, there are many questions and issues that still need to be answered and require urgent attention before being able to achieve optimate patient stratification. We need to identify better tumour biomarkers to detect disease progression, show real time response to treatment and understand why tumours evolve to becoming more aggressive. This study hopes to address these issues by proposing a multicentre prospective study to investigate the presence and role of ctDNA in advanced thyroid cancer including differentiated thyroid cancer , medullary thyroid cancer and Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer.

Conditions

Interventions