Dr Cristina Ronchi, Birmingham
Lead researcher, Dr Cristina Ronchi is a Clinician Scientist in Endocrine Oncology in the Institute of Metabolism and Systems Research at the University of Birmingham. Dr Ronchi received £7,563 from the 2019 AMEND Research Award in association with ACC Support UK.
End of Grant Report Lay Summary:
Adrenocortical carcinoma is a rare, aggressive endocrine cancer with several unmet needs. Research is essential to identify new markers that could better distinguish patients at higher risk of disease recurrence after surgical removal of the primary tumour. Moreover, innovative tools are required to improve the strategy of disease surveillance, which is currently based only on frequent radiology scans that expose patients to high radiation and may have diagnostic ambiguity. Our project aims to establish a method for the serial analysis of little fragments of DNA in the blood of patients with ACC that can be uses to simultaneously predict the clinical outcome at the time of diagnosis and monitor the disease over the time. During the time of this award, we demonstrated that our method is feasible and reliable. We need now to investigate a large cohort of patients to further validate our findings.
List of Presentations (as at March 2021):
We will present the preliminary results of this project as an oral communication at the 2021 European Congress of Endocrinology that will be held online 23-26 May 2021. Our abstract is entitled: “Somatic mutations in circulating cell-free DNA for disease surveillance in adrenocortical carcinoma”.