Endocrine Abstracts

The number of people diagnosed and living with cancer in the UK continues to rise and this also places increasing demands on specialist cancer care services (NHS England 2015). Neuroendocrine Tumours (NETs) incidence and prevalence increases alongside this demand (PHE 2016). NETs still remain a rare cancer with specialist needs and the clinical nurse specialist (CNS) team are ideally placed to support these patients. Oncology clinics are becoming increasingly pressured and the...

Neuroendocrine tumours (NETs) of unknown primary (UP-NETs) represent up to 22% of NETs. Primary site identification enables patients to access appropriate treatment but is not always possible by immunohistochemistry or imaging. Given the epigenetic dysregulation of NETs, we aimed to use methylation array data to determine UP-NET tissue-of-origin. DNA from formalin-fixed paraffin embedded tissue from 76 pancreatic NET (PanNETs) (54 training and 22 validation samples) and 53 sma...

Integration of genetics and epigenetics has emerged as a powerful approach to study cellular differentiation and tumourigenesis. The study of DNA methylation is of particular importance in cancer as causal involvement has been demonstrated and it is the most stable of all epigenetic modifications, making it a desirable marker for both early detection and treatment of tumours. Hypermethylation of CpG sites in gene promoter regions leads to decreased gene expression, if such a g...