Dr. Stratakis told me during a recent conversation that the pace at which people are looking at pituitary and adrenal tumor genetics has changed, so we thought it was important to ask what he means. Dr. Constantine Stratakis, who spent much of his career at the National Institutes of Health and now runs laboratories in Tampa, Florida, and Athens, Greece, has been working on the genetics of pituitary and adrenal tumors since long before most patients had ever heard the word “genomics.” His group cloned some of the first genes responsible for acromegaly and Cushing’s syndrome. We talked about new knowledge around the genetics of these tumors and what that knowledge can now do; how molecular markers can identify the nature of the tumor when the traditional picture is ambiguous, and how AI is accelerating products in terms of new therapies, popular in cancer research and most certainly coming for endocrine tumors.
For those of us living with pituitary and adrenal disease, the genetic and molecular information in tumors can help clarify an uncertain diagnosis, suggest whether an existing therapy is likely to work, and increasingly, point toward treatments designed specifically for the biology involved.
This article by Dr. Jennifer Perkins provides critical information on hereditary pituitary tumors – read more here
And you can read more on genetics by clinking here.
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