Evidence that the familial adenomatous polyposis gene is involved in a subset of colon cancers with a complementable defect in c-myc regulation.

Human colorectal carcinomas frequently express elevated levels of c-myc mRNA in the absence of a gross genetic change at the c-myc locus. To test the hypothesis that these tumors are defective in a gene function necessary for the regulation of c-myc expression, we fused an osteosarcoma cell line that exhibits normal c-myc regulation with two colon carcinoma cell lines that express deregulated levels of c-myc mRNA. The levels of c-myc transcripts in all of the hybrid clones examined were normal and were induced normally by a mitogenic stimulus. Since rates of c-myc mRNA turnover in the colon carcinoma cells were found to be comparable to those in normal cells, increased message stability cannot account for the increased steady-state levels of transcripts. Our findings suggest that loss of function of a trans-acting regulator is responsible for the deregulation of c-myc expression in a major fraction of colorectal carcinomas. Analysis of restriction fragment length polymorphisms in tumor/normal tissue pairs from patients with primary colorectal lesions indicated that deregulation of c-myc expression in the tumors is correlated with frequent loss of alleles of syntenic markers on chromosome 5q; allele loss on 5q could be detected in 9 of 19 tumors expressing deregulated levels of c-myc mRNA, but not in any of 8 tumors expressing normal levels of c-myc RNA. Chromosome 5q is the region known to contain the gene for familial adenomatous polyposis, an inherited predisposition to colon cancer. These findings, together with the earlier finding that the colonic distribution of tumors exhibiting deregulated c-myc expression is similar to that reported for familial polyposis, provide evidence that loss of function of the familial adenomatous polyposis gene is involved in a subset of colorectal cancers in which c-myc expression is deregulated.