Adrenal cancer: clinical advances

The purpose of this special edition of Hormones & Cancer is to relay the exciting new developments in the adrenal cancer field that have emerged in the last few years. The very successful 3rd International Adrenal Cancer Symposium: From Molecular Pathogenesis to Clinical Outcome held in Wurzburg, Germany earlier this year served as a backdrop for this project. This meeting followed two highly stimulating International Adrenal Cancer Symposia organized in Ann Arbor (Michigan, USA) and continued to be a key event in the field of adrenal cancer. More than 140 clinicians and investigators from 17 different countries attended the meeting with more than 30 talks covering the whole spectrum of this rare disease. However, rather than compile manuscripts as simple summaries of the symposium to serve as a “proceeding”, we elected to solicit bona fide state of the art “expert reviews” of various aspects of scientific and clinical import in the field of adrenal cancer. All articles were peer reviewed by experts in the endocrine, oncology, and specialized adrenal cancer field. Serendipitously, we were simultaneously given the opportunity to serve as guest editors for two separate “special editions” in both the Endocrine Society/Springer journal Hormones & Cancer and the Elsevier journal Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology. We elected to publish the more clinically relevant articles in Hormones & Cancer and the more basic articles in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology. Readers should consider these two publications’ companion editions that detail the state of the science and clinical care pertinent to this disease. In Hormones & Cancer, articles are focused on the topics of “Advances in the diagnostic and prognostic markers of adrenocortical carcinoma” (including contributions by Auchus, Papotti et al., Young, Hahner and Sundin, and Deandreis et al.) and “Current and emerging therapies for adrenocortical carcinoma” (with contributions by Baudin et al., Porpiglia et al., Berruti et al., and Demeure et al.). In the companion Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology —Adrenal Cancer: Scientific Advances Special Edition, articles provide a comprehensive view from “Adrenal development—implications for tumorigenesis” (contributions from Simon and Hammer, Gardiner et al., Lauter et al., and de Joussineau et al.) to the “Epidemiology of adrenocortical carcinoma” (contributions by Ribeiro et al., Figueiredo et al., and Almeida and Faria), “Cellular and animal models for adrenocortical carcinoma” (contributions by Wang and Rainey, Else, Luconi and Mannelli, and Wilson and Beuschlein) and “Genetics and genomics of adrenocortical carcinoma” (contributions by Berthon et al., Ribeiro and Latronico, Wasserman et al., Assie et al., and Singh et al.). The editors would like to thank Lisa K. Byrd for her administrative efforts through this process. Together with the companion Adrenal Cancer Special Edition published in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology, she kept 102 authors informed and on task, handling a total of 25 manuscripts. Without her involvement, this special edition would not have been possible. We hope you will enjoy reading those papers as much as we did while preparing the journal issues.