Driven by the same Ig enhancer and SV40 T promoter ras induced lung adenomatous tumors, myc induced pre-B cell lymphomas and SV40 large T gene a variety of tumors in transgenic mice.

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Different types of tumors developed in transgenic mice following the introduction of the entire coding region of ras, myc or SV40 large T gene (T) linked to the same regulatory unit, consisting of a human immunoglobulin gene enhancer (Ig) and SV40 early gene promoter (Tp) with a 21-bp repeat. All the 12 transgenic mice harboring the intact T gene developed a variety of tumors including choroid plexus tumor, B cell lymphoma, histiocytic lymphoma, thymoma and others. This suggests that the Ig/Tp regulatory unit has transcriptional activity in these heterologous tissues. With this regulatory unit, myc gene induced solely pre-B cell lymphomas (five out of nine mice). Contrary to our expectation, however, the mutated ras gene induced lung adenomatous tumors in six out of eight transgenic mice over the 10-month observation period; the tumors are histologically comparable to adenocarcinomas in man. The tumors developed as early as 4 weeks after birth and the introduced ras gene was as efficiently expressed in both normal and neoplastic bronchioloalveolar epithelial cells as in normal lymphoid cells. An unidentified secondary event thus appears to be necessary for these ras-expressing cells to become neoplastic, as observed for myc (Leder et al., 1986). In a variety of tumors induced by Ig/Tp-T, on the other hand, T gene was expressed only in the tumor cells, but not in normal cells. Thus, derepression of T gene in normal cells appears to be closely related to their malignant change as observed in development of pancreatic acinar cell tumors by the T gene (Ornitz et al., 1985). These results suggest that ras and myc oncogenes penetrate differentially specific types of cells, while the SV40 T gene is tumorigenic in a variety of cell types.

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