Endocrine Abstracts

Housekeeping genes (HK) are commonly used as controls for the normalization of the RNA amount in quantitative RT-PCR experiments. The question whether their expression is influenced by the metabolic state of the patient and/or the tumour transformation is still unresolved and until now, HK genes have been used in quantitative studies without considering that their expression could be different in tumor with respect to normal tissue. Aim of this study was to identify HK genes e...

Background: One of the major limits of gene therapy with sodium iodide symporter (NIS), which enables cells to be subjected to radioiodine therapy, is that NIS transfected cells rapidly release the intracellular iodine.Materials and methods: We transfected two human anaplastic (FRO) and medullary (TT) thyroid cancer derived cell lines, unable to take up iodine, with human NIS cDNA. The possibility of increasing the iodine retention time by treating cells...

We previously found that two cell lines (ARO and FRO) derived from anaplastic thyroid cancer and one (TT) deriving from medullary thyroid cancer did not respond to the retinoic acid (RA) treatment. We supposed that it was related to the lack of the RA receptor RAR beta mRNA expression. It has been suggested that the promoter methylation was one possible cause of loss of RAR beta expression.We analyzed the methylation status of RAR beta promoter in ARO, F...

Mutations in the RET proto-oncogene are responsible for multiple endocrine neoplasia type II. Somatic RET mutations were described in 50% of medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC). We describe here a novel germline mutation of the RET gene detected in an apparentely sporadic MTC.The index case was a 67 years old patient who arrived at our observation for a bilateral laterocervical linfoadenopathy. The patient was clinically evaluated for thyroid function and ...