Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Adrenocortical tumors consist of benign adenomas (ACA) and highly malignant carcinomas (ACC) with a still incompletely understood pathogenesis. Our aim was to test, whether there is evidence for an adenoma-carcinoma sequence.Patients and methods: High-resolution single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) microarrays (Affymetrix SNP 6.0) were used to detect copy number alterations (CNAs) and copy neutral losses of heterozygosity (cnLOH) in 46 adreno...

Background: Mitotane is the only drug approved for treatment of adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC). Molecular events leading to cell death in adrenocortical cells are unknown preventing the development of drugs with improved efficacy-toxicity ratio.Methods: We employed the ACC model cell line NCI-H295 to investigate the effects of mitotane on genome-wide mRNA expression using microarray analysis. Several algorithms were used to delineate signaling pathways t...

Context: Mitotane is the only drug approved for treatment of adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) and in clinical use for more than 50 years. Mitotane counteracts both tumour growth and tumoral steroid hormone production but treatment is associated with severe side effects. The molecular mechanism of mitotane is still unknown, which hampers progress in treatment of ACC.Objective: To identify the mechanism of action and molecular target of mitotane.<p class...