Catherine Verfaillie - Controversy and Aftermath Over Stem Cell Falsification

Controversy and Aftermath Over Stem Cell Falsification

The report was immediately sensational in scientific circles given that it was the first report of adult-derived stem cells to have properties previously ascribed to embryonic stem cell only. The report was immediately also used heralded by conservative lawmakers opposed to embryonic stem cell research as proof that such research is not needed. Skepticism surrounded the announcement from the beginning: Dr Stuart Orkin from the Harvard Medical School noted "If the cells are what she says -- and I have no reason to dispute that but no one has demonstrated it yet -- it's pretty remarkable. For people interested in tissue regeneration, this would be the cell to work with."

Dr. Verfaillie was noted to immediately benefit from the interest in adult stem cells with her lab size and funding immediately doubling. The discovery was considered so ground-breaking that she received several accolades in the first few years after the initial report. The British biomedical publication New Scientist declared it as the "ultimate stem cell discovery". Problems with working with MAPCs proved difficult to several laboratories who were keen to co-operate in expanding the use of MAPCs. In a report in Nature, Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at MIT was quoted by Nature stating that "I have not seen any convincing data showing that anyone has repeated the chimaera experiment, so I don't think this part of it is true", referring to the claim by Verfaillie that MAPCs when injected into mouse embryos contribute to all tissues.

The same article also quoted to Dr. Stuart Orkin of Harvard Medical School that the material transfer agreement (MTA) for procuring these cells were so restrictive that his group refused to work with them. First reports on potential problems with Verfaillie's group's work came in early 2007 when New Scientist reported that the 2002 Nature paper had some of the images appear in a second paper published at about the same time. The article also revealed duplication of images in a 2001 paper on blood, authored by Verfaillie's trainee, Morayma Reyes, and that a patent application for the MAPCs was licensed to a company called Athersys, based in Cleveland, Ohio. A series of investigations into at least three instances of data duplication/ fabrication by the University of Minnesota followed, which eventually concluded in October 2008 that Morayma Reyes had fabricated data in the 2001 paper.

The panel criticized Dr. Verfaillie's laboratory for “poor scientific method and inadequate training and oversight for this research”. It contacted Blood and asked the journal to retract the paper. The investigators also found discrepancies with images in a second paper from Dr. Verfaillie's laboratory, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2002. Those problems did not rise to the level of academic misconduct, the university said. It did not find fault directly with Verfaillie, but Dr. Tim Mulcahy concluded that the “message here is that everyone needs to fulfill their responsibility to the public and to science”.

In response to the investigation at the University of Minnesota, Nature instituted their own investigation to the 2002 controversial paper and Verfaillie was allowed to make a Corrigendum to the original paper, which did not acknowledge fabrication of data, and claimed that the original observation still held. The issue raised by Rudolf Jaenisch and others regarding the non-reproducibility of the blastocyst injection data was not addressed by the reviewers of Verfaillie. In early 2010, a third paper by the group in the American Journal of Cell Physiology was withdrawn due to "data presented have now been shown to be unreliable. This was again prompted by an investigation by 'New Scientist.