Endocrine Abstracts

The vault complex, consisting of a major vault protein (MVP), two minor vault proteins (VPARP and TEP1) and small untranslated RNA molecules (vault RNAs 1–4), is considered the largest intracellular ribonucleoprotein particle. Although in recent years, vaults were believed to be involved in multidrug resistance, the exact function of this complex has remained unclear. Recently, we investigated the therapeutic applicability of a Tumour-Vascular-Disrupting Agent (ASA) in pr...

Solid tumours are very complex tissues comprising not only cancer cells, but also non-malignant stromal cells such as endothelial cells, fibroblasts, immune cells and extracellular matrix, forming the so called tumour microenvironment. In the last few years, it has become more and more evident the pivotal role of the tumour microenvironment in modulating cancer progression and metastasis. Tumour microenvironment has thus become a potential therapeutic target. To obtain an expe...

We previously described aberrant expression of microRNAs belonging to the chromosome 19 cluster (C19MC) and the close miR-371-373 cluster in two-thirds of parathyroid carcinomas (PCas). Therefore, we investigated the involvement of the miR-371-373 cluster in parathyroid tumours, where miR-372 was the most consistently upregulated. miR-372 is known to be highly expressed in human embryonic stem cells and definitely downregulated upon differentiation. Moreover, miR-372 promotes ...

Oestradiol-17β regulates diverse tissues and cells, both within and outside the reproductive system including human cancer cells. Currently used ERs agonists or antagonists are synthetic compounds prepared by structure modifications. Alternatively, peptide mimics of steroids would allow preparation of biased combinatorial libraries of chemical and biological origin, from which estrogenic peptides with tissue selective profiles can be selected. The phage-display peptide li...

In human prostate, Oestrogen receptor α (ERα) expression in the epithelium increases with tumour Grade and promotes proliferation involving classical genomic and rapid non-genomic signalling, as well as transcription regulation of non-coding RNA. Similarly, in the tumour stroma there is up-regulation of ERα, corresponding with declining AR, resulting in a higher ratio of ERα:AR with increasing Grade. Additionally, in prostate cancer-associated fibroblasts (...