Summary Recent studies support the potential application of the wt-p53 gene in cancer therapy. Expression of exogenous wt-p53 suppresses a variety of leukaemia phenotypes by acting on cell survival, proliferation and/or differentiation. As for tumour gene therapy, the final fate of the neoplastic cells is one of the most relevant points. We examined the effects of exogenous wt-p53 gene expression in several leukaemia cell lines to identify p53-responsive leukaemia. The temperature-sensitive p53vallw mutant or the human wt-p53 cDNA was transduced in leukaemia cell lines representative of different acute leukaemia FAB subtypes, including Ml (Ozturk et al, 1992;Gotz and Montenarh 1995). Therefore, the identification of leukaemia cells susceptible to wt-p53-induced apoptosis should be useful for therapeutic purposes. In spite of the evidence that cellular context determines the final outcome of the cells after wt-p53 forced expression (Canman et al, 1995;Soddu et al, 1996), it is still unclear how to classify the cellular environments as a function of the response to wt-p53 action. In this respect, we asked whether the stage of differentiation might be a good parameter to classify the final outcome of wt-p53-transduced leukaemia cells. To address this question, seven leukaemia cell lines were transfected with a temperature-sensitive p53 (tsp53)-encoding vector or infected with a wt-p53 recombinant retrovirus. Viral infection was used in addition to plasmid transfection to evaluate the feasibility of a gene therapy approach based on wt-p53 expression in leukaemia cells. Leukaemia heat-inactivated fetal bovine serum (FBS). The Psi-2 crip-ampho (Markowitz et al, 1988) amphotropic packaging cells were cultured in Dulbecco's modified Eagle medium (DMEM) supplemented with 10% FBS. The plasmids pN53cG , carrying the ts-pS3Va-13S mutant gene (Soddu et al, 1994), and pRSVneo, carrying the selectable marker for G418 resistance, were used. The pLp53SN vector was obtained by inserting the human wt-p53 cDNA (Baker et al, 1990) into the unique BamHI site of pLXSN vectors (Miller and Rosman, 1989).
Transfections and infectionsAfter 10 min incubation on ice, HEL 92.1.7, U937 and K562 cells [5 x 106 in 0.3 ml of phosphate-buffered saline (PBS)] were electroporated (HEL 92.1.7: 0.25 kV, 960 [F; U937 and K562: 0.2 kV, 960 tF) with 10 gg of plasmid, incubated for an additional 10 min on ice and plated in complete medium. G418 was added after 48 h (HEL 92.1.7: 1 mg ml-'; U937 and K562: 750 gg ml-'). HL-60 cells transfected with pN53cG(Val-135) (HL-2) and with