Endocrine Abstracts

Prostate cancer is the most common male cancer in the UK. Currently there is a lack of pre-clinical models to predict patient’s response to treatment for prostate cancer. Identifying which patients will respond best to treatment avoids exposing patients to treatment side effects unnecessarily. Primary cell culture provides a translational model to predict individual patient’s response to drug treatments. In this study, we develop a technique for isolation, propagatio...

Background: Acromegaly treatment options include transsphenoidal surgery (TSS), medical management with somatostatin analogues (SSAs), growth hormone (GH) receptor antagonists and dopamine agonists, radiotherapy or a combination of these, depending on symptom nature and severity, tumour size, age and health status. In 2014 the Endocrine Society published guidelines for management of acromegaly.Methods: To describe current UK practice following guideline ...

Current therapies for locally advanced or metastatic prostate cancer aim to inhibit androgen receptor (AR) activation directly or by depleting androgens via androgen deprivation therapy. However this therapeutic approach eventually fails in ~80% of patients, leading to development of castrate resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). There are currently few therapeutic options available for CRPC with limited prognostic or predictive biomarkers. The aim of the current study was to dete...

We previously demonstrated that USP12 functions as an AR co-activator by directly deubiquitinating the AR and stabilising its protein levels. Additionally, we showed that USP12 targets the PHLPP AKT phosphatases leading to decreased levels of activated, phosphorylated AKT (pAKT) and as such indirectly stabilises the AR preventing its phosphorylation at serine 213. We further investigated the role of USP12 in prostate cancer by analysing the transcriptome of the LNCaP prostate ...