TFF3 and thyroid cancer: Qu et al. (2016) also reported the downregulation of TNFRSF11B in PTC. Our study, therefore, serves as a validation for the previous studies where MPPED2, TNFRSF11B, FHL1, CRABP1, or MATN2/TFF3 were individually or jointly found to be downregulated in thyroid cancer (Barros-Filho et al., 2015; Gomez-Rueda et al., 2016; Qu et al., 2016; Sepe et al., 2018; Li et al., 2021).