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Corticotropin-Releasing Factor-like Activity in ACTH Producing Tumors

Department of Internal Medicine, Tokyo Women's Medical College Tokyo 162, Japan

Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF)-like activity in two different kinds of ACTH-producing tumors (human ectopic ACTH-producing coloniccancer and rat MtT/F4 tumor) was determined by an in vitro method using isolated normal rat pituitary cells. The ACTH content of the post mortem colonic cancer was 5.5 ng/g w. wt. The ACTH content of the medium of MtT/F4 tumor cells was 153 ± 32 pg/10⁵ cells. The ACTH content of MtT/F4 tumor cell suspensions was elevated with increasing doses of hypothalamic median eminence extract (HME). The response of MtT/F4 tumor cells to HME was suppressed by 1 µg/ml of dexamethasone. Extracts of colonic cancer, MtT/F4 tumor and HME produced elevation of the ACTH content of the medium of isolated rat pituitary cells. The CRF-like activities of two kinds of tumor extracts in multiple dilutions ran parallel to that of HME. The CRF-like activities were 0.037 HME equiv/mg w. wt. in MtT/F4 tumor and 0.052 HME equiv/mg w. wt. in colonic cancer. These results demonstrated that CRF-like activity existed in these two kinds of ACTH-producing tumors.

This work was partly supported by research grants for "Specific disease" of the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare and "Malignant ectopic pituitaryhormone producing tumors" of the Japanese Ministry of Education.

^* Present address: Department of Medicine Endocrinology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, of The CityUniversity of New York, Fifth Avenue and 100th Street, New York, N.Y. 10029.

Received July 9, 1976.

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