Isolation of ORCTL3 in a novel genetic screen for tumor-specific apoptosis inducers

We have established a systematic high-throughput screen for genes that cause cell death specifically in transformed tumor cells. In a first round of screening cDNAs are detected that induce apoptosis in a transformed human cell line. Positive genes are subsequently tested in a synthetic lethal screen in normal cells versus their isogenic counterparts that have been transformed by a particular oncogene. In this way, ORCTL3 was found to be inactive in normal rat kidney cells (NRK), but to induce apoptosis in NRK cells transformed by oncogenic H-ras. ORCTL3 also causes cell death in v-src-transformed cells and in various human tumor cell lines but not in normal cells or untransformed cell lines. While ORCTL3 is a member of the organic-cation transporter gene family, our data indicate that this gene induces apoptosis independently of its putative transporter activity. Rather, various lines of evidence suggest that ORCTL3 brings about apoptosis via an ER stress mediated mechanism. Finally, we detected ORCTL3 to be down-regulated in human kidney tumors.