Testing for Afirma in Thyroid Nodules with High-Risk Indeterminate Cytology (TIR3B): First Italian Experience.

A percentage of 15 to 30% of thyroid fine-needle aspiration (FNA) is indeterminate, i.e., TIR3A and TIR3B according to the Italian consensus for thyroid cytology.

Preclinical testing of selective Aurora kinase inhibitors on a medullary thyroid carcinoma-derived cell line.

Deregulated expression of the Aurora kinases (Aurora-A, B, and C) is thought to be involved in cell malignant transformation and genomic instability in several cancer types. Over the last decade, a number of small-molecule inhibitors of Aurora kinases have been developed, which have proved to efficiently restrain malignant cell growth and tumorigenicity. Regarding medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC), we previously showed the efficacy of a pan-Aurora kinase inhibitor (MK-0457) in impairing growth and survival of the MTC-derived cell line TT.

Grey-Scale Analysis Improves the Ultrasonographic Evaluation of Thyroid Nodules.

Ultrasonography is the main imaging method for the workup of thyroid nodules. However, interobserver agreement reported for echogenicity and echotexture is quite low. The aim of this study was to perform quantitative measurements of the degree of echogenicity and heterogeneity of thyroid nodules, to develop an objective and reproducible method to stratify these features to predict malignancy.

Deregulated expression of Aurora kinases is not a prognostic biomarker in papillary thyroid cancer patients.

A number of reports indicated that Aurora-A or Aurora-B overexpression represented a negative prognostic factor in several human malignancies. In thyroid cancer tissues a deregulated expression of Aurora kinases has been also demonstrated, but no information regarding its possible prognostic role in differentiated thyroid cancer is available. Here, we evaluated Aurora-A and Aurora-B mRNA expression and its prognostic relevance in a series of 87 papillary thyroid cancers (PTC), with a median follow-up of 63 months.