Endocrine Abstracts

Background: The 5-year survival rate for patients with unresectable, metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (pNETs) remains less than 30%, emphasizing the need for new and effective treatment options for patients with advanced pNETs. Notch1 signaling is a critical cell-cell communication pathway responsible for regulating differentiation, cell fate determination, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Notch1 plays a critical role in the differentiation state of NE c...

Background: There are known outcome disparities between Black and White patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (pNETs). Recently, Black patients were shown to have higher rates of lymph node metastasis in smaller tumors than White patients, indicating possible differences in tumor biology. Numerous prognostic gene expression differences between racial groups have been reported in other cancers, but no such analysis has been conducted in pNETs. This study evaluated pNET...

Background: Patients with neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) have a 5-year survival rate of 30-60%. Surgery, and newly approved ‘tar-geted radionuclide therapy (TRT)’ with [177Lu]DOTATATE, are the only curative options for patients with NETs. TRT is limited to pa--tients that have high levels of somatostatin receptor subtype 2 (SSTR2) and can im-prove the survival of patients with low-grade tumors, but has little effect on high-grade NETs that express low SSTR2 ...

Background: Various social determinant of health (SDOH) metrics and indices are utilized to evaluate access to cancer care and to explain disparities in outcome in pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs). Little prior work has compared the validity of various geographic metrics. Therefore we aimed to examine different geographic metrics validity (from smallest to largest: census block group< census tract< zip code< county) utilizing single institutional data in a ...

Background: Tumor size and lymph node involvement (stage) have been utilized to prognosticate pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs) but the influence of race and social vulnerability on these factors remains unexplored. Therefore we sought to explore this in a racially and socioeconomically diverse cohort.Methods: We reviewed records of all patients who underwent surgical resection for PNETs from 2006-2022 at a single NCI-designated cancer center in t...

Background: Current theragnostic techniques for pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (pNETs) exploit the overexpression of somatostatin receptors (SSTRs) on the cell surface. However, approximately 25% of low-grade and most high-grade pNETs do not express SSTRs, requiring alternative theranostics. Calreticulin (CALR) is a protein linked to reticular calcium homeostasis and immunogenic cell death. Upon sufficient cellular insult, CALR translocates from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER...

Background: Following IHC of CALR, H-scoring was performed by a pathologist. H-scoring was validated by MIF of the same tissue, wherein random-forest machine learning (ML) classifiers were employed to classify cells. ML classifiers were trained to distinguish between pNET cells and tumor stroma using approximately 30% of cells for the respective cell population of interest in each TMA core. Pearson’s correlations were used to evaluate the relationship between H-scoring an...