Sunday, October 31, 2010

Report from NANETS meeting

I just returned from the NANETS meeting. Before the meeting, I had hoped that I would get to meet colleagues interested in pheo and see new studies on pheo at the NANETS meeting held in Santa Fe, October 29 and 30. NANETS stands for North American Neuroendocrine Tumor Society. It is a very nice society of doctors who treat neuroendocrine tumors. Pheo is a neuroendocrine tumor. Although the meeting was very informative on carcinoid and pancreatic endocrine tumors, there were literally only one study on pheo and one talk that mentioned pheo in passing.

The one study by a researcher in Dallas essentially showed that the mTOR pathway probably is not particularly important in the transformation from benign to malignant pheo and mTOR inhibitors (such as RAD001) probably won’t work for malignant pheo. The talk on modern gene testing by Dr. Marx at NIH briefly mentions the controversial issue of prenatal diagnosis of MEN2 (I had an earlier post on this topic in this blog) but did not delve further into pheo gene testing.

Dr. Pheo