One of the salient pathological features of rheumatoid arthritis is synovial cell proliferation with bone erosion. Despite extensive investigation, the factors essential for synovial cell proliferation remain to be identified. Recent studies suggest that human T cell leukemia virus type I (HTLV-I) may play an important role in synovial overgrowth observed in patients with one type of chronic inflammatory synovitis. In order to confirm and extend these observations, we have established synovial cell clones (SCCs) from three HTLV-I carriers who demonstrated synovial overgrowth but were otherwise asymptomatic. HTLV-I proviral DNA randomly integrated into the cellular genome was present in 20-30% of SCCs. The SCCs carrying HTLV-I proviral DNA and expressing the tax gene exhibited high levels of proliferative potential. HTLV-I was found to function as a transcriptional trans-activator in these SCCs. Moreover, transfection of the tax expression plasmid into SCCs resulted in the same phenotype of increased proliferation and cytokine expression as exhibited by HTLV-I provirus-carrying and tax-expressing SCCs. These data suggest that tax plays a critical role not only in leukemogenesis but also in synovial overgrowth in humans.