Thyroid tumors: novel insights from proteomic studies.

Several genomics-based techniques have been applied in the last decade to the molecular characterization of cancer, which has led to a variety of applications suitable for improved diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of outcome to treatment. Proteomics-based approaches have also been seen as crucial to the discovery of biomarkers for early diagnosis and prognosis of tumors, as well as for a better understanding of the molecular bases of cancer. Accordingly, proteomic techniques have been used extensively for a better molecular characterization of thyroid tumors. In this field, three main directions have been preceded: first, proteomic studies of model systems; second, proteomics of thyroid tumor specimens; and third, serum proteomics. In this review, we describe the most relevant results that have been obtained for tumors derived from thyroid follicular cells using various proteomic approaches.