Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Adrenal masses are detected in 5-7% of adults. The European guidelines on managing adrenal incidentalomas published in 20161 have standardised the management of these patients. However, evidence of the guidelines’ impact on clinical care is still lacking.Methods: We conducted a retrospective, comprehensive review of clinical presentation, radiological characteristics, final diagnosis, and outcome of a large cohort of patients ...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare aggressive cancer with heterogeneous behaviour. Disease surveillance relies on frequent imaging, which comes with significant radiation exposure. Here we investigated the role of circulating cell-free DNA (ccfDNA) in ACC monitoring. We extracted ccfDNA from 1-4 ml EDTA-plasma using the Nonacus Cell3TMXtract or the Qiagen QIAamp MinElute kit and quantified by fluorimeter. We investigated 63 patients with ACC (25M/38F, 52±...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is an aggressive malignancy with limited treatment options. We identified polo-like kinase 1 (PLK1) as one of the most overexpressed genes and potential drug target in ACC. PLK1 inhibitors (PLK1i) are under evaluation in clinical trials for other malignancies, being more effective in TP53-mutated tumours. Here we test PLK1i efficacy in four ACC cell lines with different genetic background. Efficacy of three PLK1i (i.e. Volaserti...

Background: Molecular mechanisms underlying the pathogenesis of adrenocortical adenomas (ACAs) and autonomous cortisol secretion remains frequently unexplained despite previous comprehensive genomics studies.Aim: To gain novel insights into molecular pathogenesis of adrenocortical tumours by investigating transcriptome profiles of ACAs at single-nuclei resolution (snRNA-Seq), using adult human normal adrenal glands (NAGs) as reference.<p class="abste...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare and aggressive endocrine neoplasia with heterogeneous molecular background and clinical outcome. Previous studies identified hypermethylation in specific genes to be associated with poor prognosis. Here, we aimed to investigate the role of methylation pattern for prognostic stratification of patients with ACC as compared to clinical parameters, using methods easily applicable in clinical routine. We investigated a total of 237 ACCs (96 ...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare endocrine malignancy. ACC may rarely occur as part of familial cancer syndromes, but the majority of the cases occur sporadically. A significant proportion of sporadic ACC cases may be preceded by other malignancies and adrenal metastasis from these primary tumours may frequently occur. Herein we present three cases where sporadic ACC was identified in patients with coexistent or previous history of melanoma.Case ...

Adrenocortical carcinomas (ACC) are associated with heterogeneous prognosis and limited treatment options for advanced stages. Until now no efficient targeted therapies have been identified. This study aims to identify possible new molecular drug targets for a future personalized therapeutic approach. RNA was isolated from 40 formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tumor samples from ACC patients (26F&14M, median age 46 yrs) with known genetic background (Lippert et al. JCEM ...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is an orphan tumor entity the pathogenesis of which is poorly understood. In advanced tumour stages, prognosis is unfavorable, but biomarkers for early diagnosis are lacking. MALDI-Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MALDI-MSI) enables semi-quantitative detection of a broad spectrum of analytes including endogenous cell metabolites in tissue sections. MALDI-MSI was used as a discovery approach to analyse tissue specimens of 72 ACC patients in FFPE tissue ...

Previously, we identified seven mutations in the main catalytic subunit of protein kinase A (PKA Cα) to be responsible for cortisol-secreting adrenocortical adenomas (CPAs): L206R, L199_C200_insW, S213R_L212_K214insIILR, C200_GlyinsV, W197R, del244-248+E249Q, E32V. Here we performed a functional characterization of these mutants. Specifically, we evaluated the association between PKA regulatory and catalytic subunits using co-immunoprecipitation and PKA activity using a k...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare tumor with heterogeneous outcome and no available targeted therapy. The aim of the study is to identify prognostic molecular markers and novel potential drug targets.A total of 43 FFPE tumor samples were retrospectively investigated for somatic mutations and copy number variations (CNV) by next-generation sequencing (160 cancer-related genes, Qiagen). Gene expression was evaluated by quantitative RT-PCR in a subgr...