Response to Yehia et？al.

To the Editor: We thank Yehia and colleagues for their interest in our recently published work on thyroid cancer and for highlighting the importance of our study in understanding the biological relevance of diagnostic and prognostic markers for papillary thyroid cancer (PTC). We were careful to point out that our study, although having similarities to a previous paper by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA),1 extends the genomic profiling of PTC to individuals with aggressive disease. We believe that this is a strength because it enabled us to explore markers that could play a role in advanced stages of malignancies. The fact that the two studies revealed nonetheless comparable TG mutation frequencies highlights the need to profile cancer in different ethnicities. It will indeed be of interest to investigate the role of TG in aggressive PTC in European and other populations. We also thank the authors for highlighting the importance of our finding that the majority of TG mutations identified in our cohort are most likely loss of function. Translating these genomic findings into improved patient care will be exploited in collaboration with the treating physicians in the near future