A transition in transcriptional activation by the glucocorticoid and retinoic acid receptors at the tumor stage of dermal fibrosarcoma development.

In transgenic mice harboring the bovine papillomavirus genome, fibrosarcomas arise along an experimentally accessible pathway in which normal dermal fibroblasts progress through two pre-neoplastic stages, mild and aggressive fibromatosis, followed by a final transition to the tumor stage. We found that the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) displays only modest transcriptional regulatory activity in cells derived from the three non-tumor stages, whereas it is highly active in fibrosarcoma cells. Upon inoculation into mice, the aggressive fibromatosis cells progress to tumor cells that have high GR activity; thus, the increased transcriptional regulatory activity of GR correlates with the cellular transition to the tumor stage. The intracellular levels of GR, as well as its hormone-dependent nuclear translocation and specific DNA binding activities, are unaltered throughout the progression. Strikingly, the low GR activity observed in the pre-neoplastic stages cannot be overcome by exogenous GR introduced by co-transfection. Moreover, comparisons of primary embryo fibroblasts and their transformed derivatives revealed a similar pattern--modest GR activity, unresponsive to overexpressed GR protein, in the normal cells was strongly increased in the transformed cells. Likewise, the retinoic acid receptor (RAR) displayed similar differential activity in the fibrosarcoma pathway. Thus, the oncogenic transformation of fibroblasts, and likely other cell types, is accompanied by a striking increase in the activities of transcriptional regulators such as GR and RAR. We suggest that normal primary cells have a heretofore unrecognized capability to limit the magnitude of induction of gene expression.