Next-generation sequencing for endocrine cancers: Recent advances and challenges

Abstract

Contemporary molecular biology research tools have enriched numerous areas of biomedical research that address challenging diseases, including endocrine cancers (pituitary, thyroid, parathyroid, adrenal, testicular, ovarian, and neuroendocrine cancers). These tools have placed several intriguing clues before the scientific community. Endocrine cancers pose a major challenge in health care and research despite considerable attempts by researchers to understand their etiology. Microarray analyses have provided gene signatures from many cells, tissues, and organs that can differentiate healthy states from diseased ones, and even show patterns that correlate with stages of a disease. Microarray data can also elucidate the responses of endocrine tumors to therapeutic treatments. The rapid progress in next-generation sequencing methods has overcome many of the initial challenges of these technologies, and their advantages over microarray techniques have enabled them to emerge as valuable aids for clinical research applications (prognosis, identification of drug targets, etc.). A comprehensive review describing the recent advances in next-generation sequencing methods and their application in the evaluation of endocrine and endocrine-related cancers is lacking. The main purpose of this review is to illustrate the concepts that collectively constitute our current view of the possibilities offered by next-generation sequencing technological platforms, challenges to relevant applications, and perspectives on the future of clinical genetic testing of patients with endocrine tumors. We focus on recent discoveries in the use of next-generation sequencing methods for clinical diagnosis of endocrine tumors in patients and conclude with a discussion on persisting challenges and future objectives.

The prognostic value of a seven-lncRNA signature in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: a lncRNA expression analysis

“…Gene expression profile is one of the most comprehensive ways in understanding the molecular changes in cancer. In recent decades, gene expression profiles have been explored in nearly all types of cancer due to advancements in high throughput technologies (microarray, deep-sequencing, PCR and others), and many gene signatures have been identified for predicting survival of patients with cancer [32][33][34]. For example, a 70-gene signature has been used for predicting patients' survival of in breast cancer [35] and a 42-gene signature has been used for prediction of disease relapse in early stage colon cancer [36].…”

Molecular diagnosis and targeted treatment of advanced follicular cell-derived thyroid cancer in the precision medicine era

“…Next-generation sequencing (NGS) of DNA and RNA are specific and sensitive technique [66] (Table 3) that allow simultaneous detection of multiple genomic alterations, and can obtain the most information from the least amount of tissue [65]. Commercially available platforms have been reviewed elsewhere [66,72]. To accurately detect relatively low-frequency molecular alterations (e.g.…”

Finding the broken helix: The mainstreaming of genomic medicine into clinical biochemistry

“…14 • Endocrine-related conditions such as MODY, MEN and phaeochromocytoma. 15 • Bone-related disorders such as hypophosphatasia, a condition that presents with low alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and is known to be a commonly missed diagnosis. 16 This list is by no means exhaustive.…”