Autoantibody profiling of benign and malignant thyroid tumors and design of a prototype diagnostic array

Abstract

Currently the “gold standard” in diagnostics of thyroid tumors is a fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC). However, FNAC cannot discriminate between benign and malignant thyroid tumors in 15 to 30% of observations. In order to develop an additional tool for differential diagnostics of thyroid tumors we evaluated the diagnostic performance of 3-antigen serum autoantibody signature in groups of benign ( n = 22) and malignant ( n = 26) thyroid tumors using a dot-blot ELISA-based analysis The sensitivity and specificity of resultant array were estimated to be 55–60% and 95–100%, respectively ( p < 0.001 according to one-sided Fisher Exact Test). Thus, we created a prototype antigen array for differential diagnostics of thyroid tumors which can be regarded as a platform for design of more complicated panel, highly sensitive in thyroid cancer detection, which can significantly improve the accuracy of preoperative diagnosis of thyroid cancer.