Endocrine Abstracts

In this study we describe a new allelic variant of RET, identified in a family with Medullary Thyroid Cancer (MTC) and negative for the classical RET mutations, that causes an Arg982Cys substitution in exon 18.The “in silico” analysis has shown that this variant has a reduced compatibility [score 15] with the normal biological activity of the native protein and could therefore be a transforming mutation.The aim of this wo...

Housekeeping genes (HK) are commonly used as controls for the normalization of the RNA amount in quantitative RT-PCR experiments. The question whether their expression is influenced by the metabolic state of the patient and/or the tumour transformation is still unresolved and until now, HK genes have been used in quantitative studies without considering that their expression could be different in tumor with respect to normal tissue. Aim of this study was to identify HK genes e...

Background: One of the major limits of gene therapy with sodium iodide symporter (NIS), which enables cells to be subjected to radioiodine therapy, is that NIS transfected cells rapidly release the intracellular iodine.Materials and methods: We transfected two human anaplastic (FRO) and medullary (TT) thyroid cancer derived cell lines, unable to take up iodine, with human NIS cDNA. The possibility of increasing the iodine retention time by treating cells...

We previously found that two cell lines (ARO and FRO) derived from anaplastic thyroid cancer and one (TT) deriving from medullary thyroid cancer did not respond to the retinoic acid (RA) treatment. We supposed that it was related to the lack of the RA receptor RAR beta mRNA expression. It has been suggested that the promoter methylation was one possible cause of loss of RAR beta expression.We analyzed the methylation status of RAR beta promoter in ARO, F...

18FDG-PET is based on the capability of tumor cells to take up glucose. An increment in expression of the glucose transporter 1 (GLUT1) has been observed in thyroid tumors with poor prognosis but very few data are available about the expression of other glucose transporters in thyroid. Here, we study the expression and function of GLUT isoforms 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 in human thyroid carcinoma cell lines ARO and FRO (anaplastic carcinoma), NPA (poorly-differentiated papillar...

In a previous study we demonstrated that retinoic acid (RA) decreased the growth only of thyroid carcinoma cell lines expressing RA receptor β (RAR β) and that decitabine (5-Aza-CdR) re-induced RARβ expression. The aim of this study was to analyze the effects induced by the combined treatment with RA and 5-Aza-CdR in the same thyroid cancer cell lines.We studied the effect of 5-Aza-CdR 800 nM and RA 1 μM on the expression of thyroid s...

Mutations in the RET proto-oncogene are responsible for multiple endocrine neoplasia type II. Somatic RET mutations were described in 50% of medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC). We describe here a novel germline mutation of the RET gene detected in an apparentely sporadic MTC.The index case was a 67 years old patient who arrived at our observation for a bilateral laterocervical linfoadenopathy. The patient was clinically evaluated for thyroid function and ...

Although 20% of follicular neoplasms are papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), their cytological diagnosis is not diagnostic. A different profile of gene expression between malignant and benign thyroid tumors has been reported. Aim of this study was to identify a gene expression profile to be used in distinguishing malignant from benign thyroid neoplasms. By real-time RT-PCR we analyzed mRNA expression of 6 thyroid differentiation genes (TTF-1, PAX8, TPO, TSHr, NIS and Tg) and 5 ...