Endocrine Abstracts

Cell therapy with Embryonic, Adult or iPSs Stem cells? As knowledge and scientific data start to increase the answer to that question seems still far away. Although all of them have in common their pluripotenciality and their infinite growth in vitro, the physiological regulation of stem cells in vivo is not really defined. Embryonic stem cells isolated from different steps from the initial embryonic development present in culture some different properties. New studies ...

Neoplasia and Endocrine Differentiation Research Group. Center for Research in Molecular Medicine and Chronic Diseases (CIMUS). University of Santiago de Compostela. Santiago de Compostela, Spain. This has been an extraordinary year, where scientists have not been able to get close to the laboratory in many months. However, in the pituitary/hypothalamus we have outstanding contributions. Being at home does not mean stopping thinking, as highlighted by interesting reviews on th...

The importance of cell cycle regulation in pituitary biology has been suggested from the fact that many gene-targeted mouse models of cell cycle mutations develop diverse pituitary pathologies. The retinoblastoma protein (pRb)/cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (Cdk4) pathway, one of the major mitogen-sensor routes in the cell, seems to be critical in the control of pituitary cell proliferation. Both inactivation of pRb or hyperactivation of Cdk4 result in pituitary hyperplasias or tum...

Pituitary stem cells have been characterized in the postnatal pituitary. We now know they are organized in a niche and co-express specific markers such as Sox2, Sox9 or Gfra2. Although many studies by our group and others have been dedicated to its characterization in situ it is under discussion their role in the maintenance and turnover of the pituitary in physiological conditions or physiological pituitary challenges. It’s not known if the stem cells are requir...

Introduction: Our group has a bank of human primary thyroid cultures (BANTTIC) obtained from patients. All are individual cultures specifically genotyped and phenotyped. We believe of great interest the search for biomarkers in these cultures using differential proteomic analysis.We have applied differential proteomics using 2D-PAGE coupled to MALDI-TOF-TOF-MS. We have compared benign pathologies (normal thyroid and Pendred’s syndrome) and different...

Pituitary neuroendocrine tumors (PitNETs) are mostly benign lesions originating from the anterior pituitary and represent 10–15% of all the intracranial neoplasms. PitNETs can be classified in non-secretory, clinically non-functioning pituitary adenomas (NFPAs), and secretory, comprising prolactin (PRL), growth hormone (GH) and adrenocoticotropic hormone (ACTH) PitNETs. Surgical resection is the first line treatment for PitNETs, whereas chemotherapy and radiotherapy are p...

The demonstration of postnatal stem cells in the adenopituitary (PSC) a few years ago has made us to redraw many of the cell biology concepts that we previously had for this gland. PSC organize in a three-dimensional structure, the niche, where they combine with other populations. How many populations cohabit in the niche, and which markers should we use to define cells associated to PSC we still do know not. However, we have advanced in the definition of a PSC as a cell co-ex...

Undifferentiated thyroid carcinoma is a highly aggressive human cancer with poor prognosis. A strong association has been observed between undifferentiated thyroid carcinoma and TP53 mutations. Plitidepsin (AplidinTM) a novel anticancer compound from a sea tunicate, has been reported to induce apoptosis independently of TP53 status. We investigated the actions of plitidepsin in human thyroid cancer cells. initiallyexperiments using primary cultured cells from a d...

Undifferentiated/Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC) is one of the most aggressive and deadly cancers. It is characterized by loss of thyroid expression markers and no response to conventional treatments. ATC incidence is low representing <2% of all thyroid carcinomas. This, together with its high mortality, makes difficult the development of clinical trials. In our previous works, we have developed a system to culture patient-derived thyroid cancer cells (h7H) that is a go...

Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), the most frequent thyroid cancer, has low proliferation but no apoptosis, presenting frequent lymph-node metastasis (Ordonez et al., 2004).SMAD3 has two opposite phosphorylation sites: the TGF-βRI–induced C-terminal Serine SMAD3 phosphorylation and the phosphorylation induced by CDK2 (T8, T179 and S213) and ERK (T179, S204, S208) (Wang et al. 2005, Matsuura et al. 2005).<p class=...