Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Bronchial carcinoids (BC) are rare tumors originating from endocrine cells dispersed in the respiratory epithelium. The main BC treatment is surgery, which is not feasible for large, infiltrating and metastatic disease. In these settings, medical therapy is often tried. Therefore it is important to identify new therapeutic targets and new molecules capable of providing adequate medical treatment for patients with BC. Sunitinib, is an oral, small-molecule, multi-tar...

Adrenocortical cancer (ACC) is still orphan of medical treatment. Our preliminary data show that EGF induces ACC cell lines proliferation (+20 and +10% vs control in SW13 and NCI-H295 cell lines respectively). EGF receptor (EGFR) expression is higher and ubiquitous in SW13 cells, while it is weaker in NCI-H295 cells, where it is present only on the membrane. Aim of our study is to analyze EGFR downstream signalling in ACC cell lines.EGF induces VEGF synt...

Introduction: CDKN1B gene, which encodes a cyclin-dependent kinase (Cdk) inhibitor, regulates the progression throughout G1 to S cell cycle progression. CDKN1B loss-of-function germinal mutations cause the multiple endocrine neoplasia type 4 syndrome (MEN4).Objective: The aim of the study is the functional characterization of a new 4 bp deletion in CDKN1B 5′-UTR region, identified in an acromegalic patient.Materials and metho...

Protein kinase C (PKC) is a family of serine-threonine kinases that regulate many cellular processes including proliferation and survival. Previous evidence has shown that PKC is involved in the control of human medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) proliferation and survival by modulating apoptosis, with a mechanism that implicates PKCβII isoform and translocation in different subcellular compartments.In this study, we investigated the role of PKC&#948...

Many studies demonstrated that somatic BRAF gene mutation analysis increases diagnostic accuracy for papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), even from very small samples. The gold standard for point mutations research is direct sequencing, that implies DNA extraction, PCR with specific primers, sequencing reaction and run on an automatic sequencer. This is an expensive and time consuming method, and the possible contamination with wild-type DNA not coming from the nodule significan...

Mitotane therapy is associated with many side effects, including thyroid function perturbations mimicking central hypothyroidism, possibly due to laboratory test interference or pituitary direct effects of mitotane. Therefore, we aimed at investigating whether increasing concentrations of mitotane in the therapeutic range might interfere with thyroid hormone assays and evaluate the effects of mitotane on a mouse TSH- producing pituitary cell line. TSH, FT4 and FT<su...

Familial pituitary adenoma is frequently associated with germinal mutations of several genes, including menin gene. MEN1 syndrome is an autosomic dominant disease, characterized by parathyroid adenomas, endocrine gastroenteropancreatic tumors, and pituitary adenomas, due to inactivating mutations of the MenI gene (11q13). MEN1 mutations are scattered within and around the menin open reading frame and are mainly represented by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and ...

Pituitary tumour transforming gene 1 (PTTG1) is over-expressed in a variety of endocrine-related tumors. We investigated PTTG1 expression in human C-cell hyperplasia (CCH), human medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) and in the human MTC cell line, TT. PTTG1 expression was significantly higher (P<0.01) in CCH (threefold), in papillary thyroid cancer and in MTC (fivefold) than in normal thyroid, and in MTC lymph-node metastases as compared to primary lesions (approximate...

Everolimus (RAD001), an immunosuppressant drug, has antineoplastic activity in human neoplasia, including endocrine tumors, due to its ability to inhibit the AKT down-stream signaling pathway. It has been demonstrated that AKT is overexpressed and up-regulated in pituitary tumor, including ACTH-producing pituitary tumors, that are still orphan of an effective medical therapy. We therefore investigated the effects of RAD001 on cell viability, apoptosis and mTOR phosphorilation ...

GH and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) are known to promote breast carcinogenesis. Even if breast cancer (BC) incidence in not increased in female acromegalic patients, mortality is greater as compared to general population. In order to evaluate whether GH/IGF1 excess might influence BC response to therapy, accounting for the increased mortality, we evaluated the effects of GH and IGF1 on cell proliferation of a BC cell line, the MCF7 cells, in the presence of doxorubicine...