Emerging Potential of Metabolomics in Thyroid Cancer- A Comprehensive Review

Thyroid cancer is a very common endocrine system malignancy. Nevertheless, a dearth of precise markers makes it challenging to apply precision medicine to thyroid cancer. The limitations to standard diagnosis technique (fine needle aspiration biopsy) such as indeterminate cases and inaccuracies in distinguishing between different types of cancers lead to unnecessary surgeries and thus warrant development of more discriminatory biomarkers to improve the accuracy of the existing diagnostic and prognostic techniques. Moreover, individualized therapies for thyroid cancer are necessary to avoid overtreatment of indolent lesions and undertreatment of high-risk progressive disease. Since thyroid cancer metabolic signatures are associated with disease ag-gressiveness and responsiveness to therapy, metabolomics has been recently used for diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers discovery. This strategy enabled detection of several metabolites from tissue samples or biofluids to facilitate the classification of disease aggressiveness and to potentially assist in individualized therapies. In this review, we have summarized the utilization and potential of metabolomics in thyroid cancer.