Survival Analysis of Patients with Well Differentiated Thyroid Cancer Based on Circulating Epithelial Cell Counts

Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine tumor with increased incidence in most developed and developing countries. Most thyroid cancer was well-differentiated thyroid follicular cell origin cancers as papillary and follicular thyroid cancers (80-90%). Most well-differentiated thyroid cancer patients were with well prognosis after appropriate treatment. However, there was still 15-20% of well-differentiated thyroid cancer with recurrence during follow-up period. Circulating epithelial cell (CEC) had provided biological information as factors to assess the status of cancer cells underlines its potential as independent biomarker that may improve therapeutic outcome and precision medicine approaches of thyroid cancer patients. Previous studies illustrated podoplanin (PDPN) is expressed in different cancer tissues including papillary thyroid carcinoma which had known as a marker of lymphatic endothelial cells. The aims of this study are to retrospective analysis of long term therapeutic outcome of 4,458 thyroid cancer patients in one medical center in Taiwan, clinical and laboratory prognostic factors for well-differentiated thyroid cancer will be analyzed. PDPN expression in CEC cells will be assayed in 200 selected well-differentiated thyroid cancer patients. In addition, the change of age, histological finding will be proposed in American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) 8th edition analyzed in this cohort. Clinical features and long term follow-up results including recurrence, disease specific mortality, total mortality will be analyzed in 4,023 well differentiated thyroid cancer patients. Survival analysis with PDPN expression will be analyzed in selected 200 patients. The project may provide the update information for clinical and laboratory prognostic predictors for well-differentiated thyroid cancer in Taiwan.

Project ID:PC10708-1098
External Project ID:MOST107-2314-B182-003