By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

After months of controversy, scientists have retracted two high-profile studies that purported to demonstrate a quick and simple way of making flexible stem cells without destroying embryos or tinkering with DNA.

“Several critical errors have been found in our Article and Letter,” the scientists wrote in a retraction statement issued Wednesday. “We apologize for the mistakes.”

The two reports described a new way of reprogramming blood cells so that they would revert to a developmentally primitive state and be capable of growing into any type of cell. Researchers from Japan and the United States said they accomplished this feat by soaking the cells in an acid bath for 30 minutes and then spinning them in a centrifuge for 5 minutes.

The resulting stem cells — dubbed stimulus triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP — had the hallmarks of embryonic stem cells. When the researchers injected them into developing mice, the STAP stem cells grew into heart, bone, and brain cells, among others, the research team reported in January.

Scientists in the field of regenerative medicine were giddy at the prospect of using the cells to grow new insulin-producing cells for people with Type 1 diabetes or central nervous system cells for people with spinal cord injuries, to name a few examples. Since these replacement tissues would be generated from a patient’s own cells, researchers believed they would not prompt the immune system to attack, eliminating the need for patients to take immune-suppressing drugs.

But it didn’t take long for some researchers to suspect that STAP stem cells were too good to be true. Critiques posted online gained more currency when labs began reporting that they weren’t able to replicate the experiments. Then one of the senior researchers who worked on both of the studies called for the papers to be withdrawn until the results could be independently verified.
In April, the Japanese research institute where most of the work was conducted accused study leader Haruko Obokata of intentional misconduct.

Investigators at RIKEN said Obokata had manipulated two images of DNA fragments to make the results of her experiments look better than they really were. They also found that data were handled inappropriately and that two of the images in the study were duplicates.

Investigators at the journal Nature cited five additional errors that were not included in the RIKEN investigation. Figures and images in the studies were improperly labeled, and one of the images was digitally enhanced, according to the retraction statement. They also identified “inexplicable discrepancies” in the cells of mice that were injected with STAP stem cells.

“These multiple errors impair the credibility of the study as a whole and we are unable to say without doubt whether the STAP-SC phenomenon is real,” the scientists wrote in the retraction. “Ongoing studies are investigating this phenomenon afresh, but given the extensive nature of the errors currently found, we consider it appropriate to retract both papers.”

All of the researchers who contributed to both papers have agreed with the decision to retract them, according to an editorial published by the journal.

Photo: UC Irvine via Flickr

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