Progressive metastatic medullary thyroid carcinoma: first- and second-line strategies

The treatment for metastasised medullary thyroid cancer is still a topic of discussion. One of the main challenges remains to find effective adjuvant and palliative options for patients with metastatic disease. The diagnostic and treatment strategies for this tumour are discussed and possible new developments commented. Approaches that target rearranged during transfection (RET) are preferable to those that target RET downstream proteins as, theoretically, blocking RET downstream targets will block only one of the many pathways activated by RET. Combining several agents would seem to be more promising, in particular agents that target RET with those that independently target RET signalling pathways or the more general mechanism of tumour progression.