Endocrine Abstracts

Communication takes many forms in the endocrine system, but this talk will focus on the basic biology of endocrine hormone action.In men, testicular androgens are essential communicator proteins for many target organs including bone, prostate and brain, but there is increasing evidence that estrogens are just as important in men as in women. Using the prostate gland to exemplify the mechanism of action of estrogens in the male, the role of systemic commu...

Introduction: Lack of clinically relevant experimental models of human prostate cancer hampers evaluation of novel therapeutic agents. Currently, androgen deprivation therapy is the gold standard treatment for advanced prostate cancer, but inevitably cells survive and repopulate the tumour. Castrate-resistant cells are critical therapeutic targets for more effective treatments but current model systems cannot determine when they arise in disease progression and are unable to r...

In human prostate, Oestrogen receptor α (ERα) expression in the epithelium increases with tumour Grade and promotes proliferation involving classical genomic and rapid non-genomic signalling, as well as transcription regulation of non-coding RNA. Similarly, in the tumour stroma there is up-regulation of ERα, corresponding with declining AR, resulting in a higher ratio of ERα:AR with increasing Grade. Additionally, in prostate cancer-associated fibroblasts (...

Introduction: Prostate cancer is hormone dependent and regulated by a balance of androgens as well as estrogens. Regulatory control is also exerted by the tumor microenvironment including cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs), and immune cells. Although patient derived xenografts (PDX) commonly used to study the functional effects of CAFs, the method is not quantitative, is lengthy, technically challenging and the xenografts are placed in immune suppressed hosts excluding immun...