Endocrine Abstracts

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: 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...