Endocrine Abstracts

In the past 20 years or so careful observations in human and rodent diseases of bone metabolism have greatly helped to understand these diseases, but also uncover important pathways in bone metabolism. Such pathways have led to successful drug discovery programmes and some of the latest drugs to be licensed for use in common bone diseases have directly been the result of understanding such ‘experiments of nature’. An example is the targeting of cathepsin K as an anti...

Bone is a dynamic tissue, maintained and repaired by the actions of, osteoclasts, osteoblasts and osteocytes, together with a variety of bone marrow cells, stromal cells and endothelium. Osteoblasts lay down bone and this is subsequently remodelled by osteoclasts. Osteocytes act mainly as mechanosensors. Osteoclasts are of haemopoietic origin, whereas osteoblasts are derived from mesenchymal stem cells. During cell differentiation and in mature cells, cell adhesion molecules a...