Synergism between K-rasVal12 and mutant Apc accelerates murine large intestinal tumourigenesis

K-ras (KRAS) is mutated in 40-50% of human colorectal adenomas and carcinomas and plays key roles in cell proliferation, apoptosis, motility and differentiation, but its functional contribution to intestinal tumourigenesis in vivo remains incompletely understood. We have previously crossed K-rasVal12 transgenic mice with Ah-Cre mice to produce K-rasVal12/Cre offspring that inducibly express K-rasVal12 4A and 4B in the intestines, but this alone showed no significant effect on intestinal adenoma formation. Here, we crossed these mice with Min mice to evaluate the effect of K-rasVal12 and Apc mutation on intestinal tumourigenesis in vivo. The double mutant K-rasVal12/Cre/ApcMin/+ mice showed a moderate (1.86-fold) increase in adenomas in the small intestines, but a striking acceleration (6-fold increase) of large intestinal adenoma formation (P<0.01) and significantly reduced survival (by ~5 weeks) compared with control ApcMin/+ mice (P<0.01). There was recombination of the mutant K-rasVal12 transgene in 80% of large intestinal adenomas with expression of both K-rasVal12 4A and 4B isoform transcripts and expression of K-RasVal12 protein. The large intestinal adenomas showed immunohistochemical evidence of activation of MapK, Akt and Wnt signaling pathways and this was confirmed by quantitative RT-PCR analysis of relative transcript expression levels of target genes using a panel of 23 selected genes evaluated in both adenomas and non-tumour-bearing intestines. Several genes including Tiam1, Gastrin, CD44, uPA, Igfbp4, VEGF and Cox-2 that are known to be transcriptionally regulated by activation of the Wnt signaling pathway were found to be expressed at higher levels in the large intestinal adenomas from K-rasVal12/Cre/ApcMin/+ mice compared with those from controls, although other Wnt signaling pathway target genes remained unchanged. These data show that intestinal expression of K-rasVal12 accelerates Apc-initiated intestinal adenomagenesis in vivo with particularly striking tumour promotion in the large intestines and indicate synergistic effects between mutant K-ras and mutant Apc in this process.