Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is an extremely aggressive malignancy with a dismal prognosis. Inactivation of the p53 tumor-suppressor gene occurs in approximately 50% of primary tumors and is thought to account for a failure of the tumor cells to undergo growth arrest and apoptosis in response to chemotherapy. Hence, it is of interest to study the consequences of the restoration of wild-type (wt) p53 function in pancreatic carcinoma cells. Therefore, we retrovirally transduced temperature-sensitive (ts) human p53 into the p53-null pancreatic carcinoma cell line AsPC-1. ts p53 has a mutant phenotype at 37.5 degrees C, and a wt conformation at 32.5 degrees C. Stable expression of p53 in wt conformation caused upregulation of the p53 responsive gene p21Waf1/Cip1, and G1 growth arrest, but failed to induce Bax expression or apoptosis. In addition, we examined the effect of wt p53 expression on DNA damaging treatment. Interestingly, the doxorubicin- and radiation-induced S-/G2-phase arrests were suppressed by p53 in wt conformation. These results demonstrate that the ts p53/AsPC-1 model is suitable to investigate the effect of wt p53 restoration in pancreatic carcinoma cells.