Endocrine Abstracts

Autoimmune immunoglobulins directed against peptide hormones are well-described. These are often clinically benign, but may cause a deleterious effect on the accuracy of clinical immunoassays. A notable exception is Insulin Autoimmune Syndrome (IAS, also known as Hirata disease), where antibody-binding has a direct effect on insulin kinetics resulting in aberrant glucose control. Current methods to diagnose IAS rely on crude immune-subtraction techniques such as polyethylene g...

Background: The recently published ‘Consensus on Criteria for Cure of Acromegaly’ (Giustina et al. JCEM, 2010) highlighted concerns regarding the quality of currently available insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) immunoassays which may contribute, at least in part, to the discordance between GH and IGF1 that is observed in up to 30% of patients with acromegaly after treatment. The development of mass spectroscopy (MS)-based technology has been proposed ...

Backgrounds and aims: Enteroendocrine cells (EECs) are hormone-secreting cells within the intestinal epithelium that play an important role in regulating food absorption, insulin secretion and appetite. The somatostatin (SST)-producing D-cell is an EEC of particular interest due to the profound inhibition exerted by SST over other EECs, highlighting D-cells as critical regulator of the enteroendocrine axis. The aim of this study was to profile the transcriptom...

Objective: Motilin is a proximal small intestinal hormone with roles in gastrointestinal motility, gallbladder emptying and hunger initiation. The molecular mechanisms underlying motilin release in response to fats, bile and duodenal acidification are poorly understood, in part due a lack of suitable cellular and rodent models. We therefore generated a novel human intestinal organoid model with fluorescently labelled motilin-expressing M-cells, which we used to establish the k...