Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Metformin is used as a first line treatment in type 2 diabetes. Several studies suggest that patients with type 2 diabetes treated with metformin may have reduced cancer risk. Recently it has been shown that Metformin acts directly on mitochondria to alter cellular bioenergetics and reduce tumorigenesis. We have shown that anti-proliferative effect of Mitotane is related with changes of expression of the genes involved in mitochondrial metabolism in human adrenoc...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare malignancy, but accounts for up to 11% of adrenal masses investigated in referral centres. Diagnosis remains a challenge. Up to two thirds are biochemically inactive, resulting from de facto enzyme deficiencies in the steroid hormone biosynthetic pathways, as shown by urine steroid profiling by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Increased metabolites of pathway intermediates in ACC discriminate it from benign adrenal lesions...

Introduction: Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare disease with a poor prognosis and limited therapeutic options. Mitotane is considered as a first-line therapy but only 30% of the patients showing an objective tumour response.Erlotinib and gefitinib (tyrosine kinase inhibitors – TKI) inhibit the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which is highly expressed and occasionally mutated in various cancers. EGFR expression was found to be a good ...

Background: Cushing’s disease is caused by corticotroph tumours of the pituitary gland and the standard first-line treatment is trans-sphenoidal surgery. Published data from other centres describes post-operative endocrine remission achieved in 50–90% of cases.Table 1 Remission (cortisol <50)Cortisol (50–150 nmol/l)<td alig...

Introduction: Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) has a poor prognosis and limited therapeutic options. The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expression was found to be a good discriminator between malignant and benign adrenal tumours, but was mutated only in 3–10% of ACC cases.Aim: The aim of this study was to assess the effect of inhibition of EGFR with targeted therapies, i.e. Erlotinib (with and without EGF stimulation) on ACC cell proliferatio...