Endocrine Abstracts

: Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours (pNETs) are rare neoplasms arising from the endocrine pancreas. The fist line treatment is surgery that is often not curative in the presence of metastatic disease. Therefore, there is an increasing need for medical therapy. Sunitinib is a multi-target receptor tyrosine-kinase (RTK) inhibitor, described as having as main target VEGF receptor, with antitumor and antiangiogenic effects, approved for pNETs medical treatment. This study is aimed...

Finding new preclinical models to study the effects of anticancer drugs is one of the aims of biomedical research. Indeed, testing different in vitro systems can lead to a better understanding of the molecular pathways regulating tumor development and growth, and help to find new therapeutic approaches. This is crucial especially in the settings of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours (pNET), where one of the main drugs approved for medical treatment is Sunitinib, a mult...

: Magmas, a gene encoding for the mitochondrial import inner membrane translocase subunit, Tim16, protects different cell lines from the antitumoral effects of several pro-apoptotic stimuli (i.e. chemicals and chemotherapeutic agents). The synthetic Compound 5 is capable of sensitizing chemoresistant tumor cells overexpressing Magmas to proapoptotic stimuli, indicating that this molecule may be useful to overcome tumor chemoresistance. The aim of our study was to evaluate whet...

Introduction: It is known that growth hormone (GH) may influence neoplastic development of endometrial epithelium. GH is produced by normal and neoplastic endometrial cells and elevated levels have been observed in endometrial epithelium of patients with endometriosis and endometrial adenocarcinoma (EA). Moreover, endometrium cancer is one of the most occurring tumors in acromegalic patients. Furthermore, autocrine GH increases the oncogenicity of EA cells and is considered fu...

Acromegaly results from excess growth hormone (GH) secretion, due to a pituitary adenoma. Surgery is the first option recommended for treatment of GH secreting pituitary adenomas; medical therapy, mostly represented by somatostatin analogues (SSA), is most often used if surgery is not successful. Insulin-like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1) physiologically reduces GH levels through an endocrine negative feedback loop. IGF-1 exerts its effects also through PI3K/Akt/mTO...

Surgery is not feasible for infiltrating and metastatic bronchopulmonary NET (BP-NET). In those cases, medical therapy is tried with controversial results. Thus, it is important to identify new therapeutic targets to provide adequate medical treatment for patients with BP-NET. Sunitinib, is a multi-targeted receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), mainly described to inhibit VEGFR.The aim of our study is to verify whether insulin receptor (IR), IGF1R, a...

Background: Bronchial carcinoids (BC) are rare neoplasm, still orphan of medical therapy, which arise from neuroendocrine cells. It has been previously demonstrated that the atypical BC human cell line NCI-H720 is sensitive to everolimus (E), an m-TOR inhibitor, in terms of cell viability reduction, with a G0 cell-cycle arrest and a Cyclin D1 protein reduction. On the contrary, the typical human BC cell line NCI-H727 is not sensitive to E, despite the Cyclin D1 reduction. The ...

TIM16, a protein of the translocase complex TIM23 of the mitochondrial inner membrane, is encoded by the Magmas a gene. Magmas silencing has been associated with a greater sensitivity to apoptotic stimuli in pituitary adenoma cell lines. We recently demonstrated that in a human medullary thyroid carcinoma cell line (TT) compound 5, a TIM16 inhibitor, was not cytotoxic but enhanced the proapoptotic effects of staurosporine. The aim of our study is to verify whether mithocondria...

TIM16 a component of the translocase complex TIM23 of the mitochondrial inner membrane is encoded by the Magmas gene. Magmas was found to be over-expressed in human pituitary adenomas. Silencing Magmas in ACTH secreting rat pituitary adenoma cells enhances sensitivity to pro-apoptotic stimuli. Moreover, Magmas overexpression protects GH secreting rat pituitary adenoma cell lines towards apoptosis. Recently, we found that compound 5, a TIM16 inhibitor, is not cytotoxic but enha...