Endocrine Abstracts

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is one of the most aggressive endocrine malignancies. By applying a ‘multiple omics’ approach, we recently identified two distinct subgroups of ACC patients, a good prognosis “immune” and bad prognosis “steroid” phenotype.We hypothesized that the steroid phenotype is associated with glucocorticoid-induced suppression that can be ‘rescued’ by reactivating the immune system using immune...

Context: Mitotane (1,1-dichloro-2-[o-chlorophenyl]-2-[p-chlorophenyl]ethane) is the only drug approved for treatment of adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC). Mitotane counteracts both tumor growth and tumoural steroid hormone production but treatment is severely hampered by unfavorable pharmacokinetics and serious side effects. Mitotane is a lipophilic compound and treatment emergent alterations of lipid metabolism are frequently observed. This raises the question whether mitotane d...

Context: Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) are endocrine malignant neoplasms associated with severe aggressiveness. Tumour-related glucocorticoid excess occurs in 60% of patients and is associated with poor prognosis. First clinical trials using immune checkpoint inhibitors are quite unsatisfactory and treatment advancements are urgently needed.Recently, we characterized tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in ACC and identified the detrimental dependency...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a rare malignancy with heterogeneous but dismal prognosis and despite numerous efforts to improve patient care, effective treatment options are still lacking. ACC in vitro research faces for decades one major obstacle - the unavailability of different ACC cell line models. Here, we present a newly established human ACC cell line that was directly transferred to and now proliferates in cell culture. JIL-O cell line was derived from a p...

Introduction: Streptozotocin (SZ) is an active drug for the treatment of advanced adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) in a minority of patients with an objective response rate of <10%. It has been reported that expression of glucose transporter-2 (GLUT-2) is essential for SZ to enter tumor cells and that high activity of O-6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) counteracts the alkylating effect of SZ. Therefore, we aimed to clarify the role of GLUT-2 and MGMT in the respo...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is a very severe endocrine malignancy with poor prognosis. While cancer immunotherapies have revolutionized the treatment of several cancer entities, the results of initial studies of different immune checkpoint inhibitors in ACC were heterogeneous and clinically substantial responses were observed only in a subset of patients. Expression of immune checkpoint molecules - programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) and its ligand PD-L1 - has been shown to pred...

Objective: Glucocorticoid excess impairs immune function, thereby predisposing patients with endogenous Cushing’s syndrome (CS) to infections. However, it is still not clear whether there is a CS-subtype specific pattern in white blood cell (WBC) and WBC differential (WBCD) count.Methods: Retrospective monocentric cohort study in patients with either overt endogenous CS or adrenal adenomas with autonomous cortisol secretion (ACS), with WBC and WBCD ...

Background: Mitotane is the only drug approved for treatment of adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC). We have found that mitotane leads to endoplasmic reticulum stress and decreased viability in ACC cells. It is not known by which downstream mechanisms cell death is induced by mitotane.Aim: To characterize the mechanisms underlying cell death resulting from mitotane treatment in ACC cells.Methods: Lipid peroxidation in the ACC cell line ...

Context: Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) are endocrine malignant neoplasms associated with severe aggressiveness. By applying of ‘multiple omics’ approach, we recently categorized ACC patients based on their steroidogenic activity and expression of immune activation marker, which is along with prognosis; an ‘immune’ phenotype with good and a ‘steroid’ phenotype with bad outcome.Hypothesis: Our central hypothesis focuses on th...

Ad Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is an aggressive tumour and treatment remains unsatisfactory in advanced disease. Activation of epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) is considered causative for metastatic spread in a variety of human cancers. Accordingly, new drugs were developed specifically targeting EMT with a focus on hepatocyte growth factor (HGF)/HGF receptor (c-MET) and fibroblast growth factor (FGF)/FGF receptor (FGFR) signalling.We here a...