Genomic landscape of papillary thyroid carcinoma in Kuwait reveals novel candidate somatic variants

Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is the most common thyroid malignancy and is increasingly diagnosed in the Middle East, including Kuwait. To characterize its genomic landscape, targeted next-generation sequencing was performed on 72 histologically confirmed PTC tumors collected between 2019 and 2022. DNA from FFPE samples was analyzed using a high-depth cancer gene panel with standardized pipelines for variant calling, annotation, and pathogenicity filtering. The cohort (median age 46.5 years)