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Direct Action of a Leukemogenic Virus on the Thymus¹

Department of Radiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, California

When a leukemogenic virus (radiation leukemia virus, RLV), extracted from radiogenic lymphomas of strain C57BL mice, was directly injected either into 1 lobe of the thymus in situ in newborn C57BL mice, or into intrarenal C57BL thymic grafts in thymectomized, irradiated C57BL or F, hybrid hosts, a high incidence of lymphoid tumors developed after an unusually short latent period. No such tumors resulted when RLV was injected into intrarenal grafts of spleen or lymph node in similarly prepared hosts. In the neonatally inoculated animals, tumors originated invariably in the injected lobe, indicating that there is a direct neoplastic interaction between RLV and target cells in the thymus. Histologic examination and transplantation assays revealed that "transformed" cells with neoplastic potentialities are present in the thymus grafts as early as 1 week after virus inoculation. Virus injection into graft-bearing hybrid hosts elicited a high proportion of tumors that exhibited the transplantation behavior characteristic of donor cell derivation. Data on other parameters, such as the route of virus injection, the interval between graft placement and virus injection, and the requirement for systemic or partial-body irradiation are also presented.

¹ This investigation has been supported by Research Grant CA 03352 from the National Cancer Institute, USPHS. Preliminary reports of this work were presented at the annual meetings of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago, Illinois, April, 1964, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April, 1965.

² Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation Fellow, 1963–1964, on leave from the Department of Experimental Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovoth, Israel.