Endocrine Abstracts

Thyroid cancer (TC) is the most common endocrine malignancy, with an increasing number of diagnosis in the last decades. Of all TC histotypes, the poorly differentiated and anaplastic TCs (PDTC and ATC) have a very poor prognosis because of their invasiveness and metastatic behavior, as well as their insensitivity to radioactive-iodine treatment. In the last years, the stem-cell model has been proposed to further explain TC carcinogenesis. According to this model, only a subse...

Thyroid cancer (TC) is the most common endocrine tumor and its incidence has increased faster than in any other malignancy. Although TCs are usually well differentiated, disease recurrence or persistence is high, because of local and distant metastasis and therapeutic resistance. As in other cancer types, despite the promising results obtained in pre-clinical studies, the efficacy of Targeted Therapy is highly variable and therapy resistance is not uncommon. This may be due to...

Thyroid cancer (TC) is the most common Endocrine malignancy. Nowadays Undifferentiated Thyroid Cancers (UTCs) are still a lethal disease, mostly because of the lack of effective therapeutic options. The insurgence of therapy resistance and disease relapse is believed to be caused by a subpopulation of cancer cells with a stem-like phenotype and specific tumor-initiating abilities, the so called Tumor-Initiating Cells (TICs). Several markers have been identified and described o...

Thyroid cancer (TC) is the most common endocrine tumor and its incidence has increased faster than in any other malignancy. Although TCs are usually well differentiated, disease recurrence or persistence is high, because of local and distant metastasis and therapeutic resistance. Among the different genetic alterations, BRAFV600E is the most frequent one. Several studies tried to establish a correlation between BRAFV600E and patients outcome, with controversial results. Nevert...

Medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) is a rare neuroendocrine tumor arising from parafollicular C-cells. Nowadays different targeted therapies are available, directed mostly against the main genetic driver of MTC, RET, and against the common pro-oncogenic pathways of VEGF, EGFR and c-MYC. Despite this, an escape phenomenon has been observed with sudden disease progression during treatment, leaving surgery as the only curative treatment. The evaluation of pre and post treatment ge...

Objectives: Differentiated TCs are generally sensitive to first line treatments and tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). However, part of them along with undifferentiated TC, namely Anaplastic (ATC) and Poorly Differentiated (PDTC), are aggressive and show refractoriness to tyrosine-kinase inhibitors (TKIs) treatments. A correlation between resistance to TKIs and inactivating TP53 mutations was proven in TC by our group, consistent with data obtained in other tumors. To...

FAM83B has been recently identified as an oncogene involved in the development and progression of several malignancies, but its role in thyroid cancers (TC) is still unclear. In the present study, we examined the expression of FAM83B and its possible involvement in cell migration and differentiation, in neoplastic and normal thyroid tissues and in TC human cell lines. We found that FAM83B expression in TC varies according to tumor histotype, being si...

Introduction: Cells with stem-like properties have been reported in benign and malignant thyroid diseases, and can be propagated by culturing them as non-adherent spheres.Design: Aim of the present study was to widely characterize the stem-like cells in tumor and normal thyroid tissues and in the corresponding in vitro-cultured thyrospheres, and to investigate in vivo the proangiogenic potential of thyrospheres in a zebrafish model....