Endocrine Abstracts

Personalized medicine aims at providing indications concerning the management of each patient according to her/his specific needs and disease characteristics. Acromegaly, although a rare disease, has a profound impact on patients’ quality and expectancy of life, due to increased morbidity and mortality as compared to the general population in correlation mainly due to cardiovascular disease and cancer. Several clinical variables have been investigated as predictors of res...

Recent advances in molecular pathology have improved our knowledge on the pathogenesis of pituitary tumors, as well as on their growth potential, likelihood of recurrence, and prognosis. The development of reliable and prognostically informative methods of assessing tumor behavior is particularly important in pituitary tumors, where no precise correlation exists between morphology and clinical aggressiveness. Specific morphologic features (macroscopic invasion of the perisella...

Background: Gigantism and acromegaly are the main consequences of GH excess, mainly due to a pituitary adenoma. Surgery is the first therapeutic option, but also medical therapy is employed, being represented mostly by somatostatin analogues (SSA), that reduce both tumour mass and GH hypersecretion. However about 10% of patients is resistant to SSA.PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway, activated by growth-factors such as IGF1, is important in regulating many cellular p...

Introduction: Tumor-induced osteomalacia (TIO) is a paraneoplastic syndrome due to an overproduction of fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23) by small and benign mesenchimal tumors. FGF23 increase causes hypophosphatemia, osteomalacia and muscle weakness. TIO is usually cured by tumour resection, but neoplasms may be unidentifiable/unresectable or the patient may refuse surgery. In these cases, medical treatment with high doses of oral phosphate and calcitriol is mandatory, even...

Introduction: Magmas encodes for an integral constituent of the TIM23 translocase complex located in the mitochondrial inner membrane that drives proteins from the intermembrane space into the mitochondrial matrix by functionally interacting with Tim14. We previously demonstrated that Magmas silencing is able to sensitize ACTH-secreting mouse pituitary adenoma cells to pro-apoptotic stimuli, reduce DNA synthesis, accumulate cells in G0/G1 phase with concomitant decrease in S p...

Introduction: Broncho-Pulmonary Neoplasms (BP-NENs) are rare neoplasms arising from neuroendocrine cells of the respiratory epithelium. Since previous studies in our lab have demonstrated the efficacy ofEverolimus, approved for BP-NENs treatment, and Dinaciclib, a Cyclins and CdKs inhibitor, on monolayer system we have investigated if a more complex tumour system could generate a change in drugs effects and cell resistance. Therefore, through the use of 3D culture model, we ha...

Background: Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Neoplasms (pNENs) are malignancies arising from the endocrine pancreas. Past in vitro studies have led to a better comprehension and characterization of this malignancy under several points of view. However, effective medical therapies are still not available, therefore, it is essential to continue studying this malignancy in order to identify a successful approach. Due to tumour complexity, techniques such as 3D cultures, able to...

Background: Surgery is the main therapeutic option for advanced endometrial cancer; however, when disease relapses, chemotherapy is the only option. Chemoresistance is a very common phenomenon in these tumors. We previously demonstrated that GH protects breast cancer cells towards the cytotoxic effects of doxorubicin, inducing chemoresistance. Recent evidences show that endometrial cancer cells secrete GH, stimulating their own growth in an autocrine fashion.<p class="abst...

Background: Bronchial carcinoids (BC) are still orphan of medical therapy. We previously demonstrated that the typical BC human cell line NCI-H727 is sensitive to Everolimus, in terms of cell viability reduction, while the atypical human BC cell line NCI-H720 is not. However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not been fully clarified.Aim: The aim of our study is to investigate the mechanisms of resistance to mTOR inhibitors in BC cells.<...

Adrenocortical cancer (ACC) is a rare and aggressive malignancy. Currently the main therapeutic option is surgery, but due to difficult and delayed diagnosis and to the onset of metastases, medical therapy is often tried. ACC treatment is mainly represented by Mitotane alone or in association with chemotherapy, with variable results. Understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate ACC proliferation could be useful to identify new therapeutic options. Aim of our study is t...