Proliferation and neoplastic transformation of pigment cells in metallothionein/ret transgenic mice

Although melanoma is a common human disease, there were few animal models in which melanoma developed at high incidence. To date, the Xiphophorus fish has been used as a model system to study melanoma formation. Studies on this fish showed the presence of a dominant oncogene, Tu, which encodes a transmembrane, tyrosine kinase of epidermal growth factor receptor type (Wittbrodt et al., Nature, 341:415-421, 1989). Recently, we succeeded in establishing novel transgenic mouse lines in which melanosis and melanocytic tumors developed stepwise by introducing another transmembrane tyrosine kinase oncogene, ret (Iwamoto et al., EMBO J., 10:3167-3175, 1991). In our transgenic mice, high levels of expression of the ret transgene induced proliferation and neoplastic transformation of melanin-producing cells. In addition, crossbreeding experiments between transgenic mice and Wv mice showed that the ret oncogene can also induce melanogenesis and melanocyte development in Wv/Wv mice.