Troglitazione affects survival of human osteosarcoma cells. Activation of PPAR gamma, a transcription factor member of the family of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors, induces apoptosis in several normal and tumor cell lines. In our study, we investigated whether treatment with troglitazone (TRO), a known PPAR gamma agonist, induced apoptosis in the human osteosarcoma (OS) cell lines G292, MG63, SAOS and U2OS that express PPAR gamma. In our experiments, TRO never induced apoptosis of OS cells; on the contrary, TRO increased cell number, based on MTT proliferation assay. Remarkably, the TRO-induced cell number increase depended on a decrease of apoptosis that naturally occurred in the culture and was not due to an increased cell proliferation rate. TRO also prevented staurosporin-induced apoptosis. The TRO-mediated survival effect correlated with the activation of Akt, a well-known mediator of survival stimuli. Our work describes a new function for TRO and indicates that the Akt survival pathway may be a mediator of TRO-induced increase of survival.Copyright 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.