The pathophysiology, diagnosis and prognosis of adrenocortical tumors revisited by transcriptome analyses.

Analyzing gene expression (transcriptome) in tissue is now reliable using industrial pangenomic microarrays. Accumulating data on adrenal cortex and adrenocortical tumor transcriptomes have already identified striking transcriptome differences not only between adenoma and carcinoma but also between two sets of carcinoma, which have very different prognoses. These findings result in the development of diagnostic and prognostic molecular predictors, which improve the outcome determination compared with standard clinical and pathological tools. These transcriptome data observing adrenocortical tumor phenotype in great but complex detail, combined with genomic and proteomic information, will function for future research investigating the pathophysiology of their tumorigenesis and hormonal secretion.