Charles A. Vacanti

Career Vacanti graduated from Creighton Preparatory High School, gained his B.A. from Creighton University in 1968, and his M.D. from the University of Nebraska College of Medicine in 1975, and then completed his surgical intern and residency at Medical Center Hospital of Vermont (now called the University of Vermont Medical Center) in 1978. With his brothers, he was named Alumnus of the Year in 2002 and received an Alumni Achievement Citation from Creighton in 2005.

Vacanti was a research associate at MIT and the Children's Hospital Boston, and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He became chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and a Professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

In September 2002, Vacanti joined Brigham and Women's Hospital, succeeding Simon Gelman as department chair for Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine. Following the STAP cells controversy, Vacanti stood down as department chair at Brigham and Women's Hospital and took a one-year sabbatical from September 1, 2014, then retired in 2015.

Tissue engineering

Although his background is in anesthesiology, Vacanti began work in tissue engineering in the late 1980s with his brother Joseph, also known as Jay, who was working on liver regeneration. the work was rejected from a "top journal" as it was said to have "no practical implications".

Vacanti and his brother Joseph successfully used the same technique to grow a chest plate for a 12-year-old boy, Sean McCormack, who had been born without cartilage or bone over his heart and left lung. The work was approved by the FDA, but they did not approve also growing cartilage and tendons. and his coining is disputed (for example, the term was used in 1984 in the same context by an ophthalmic surgeon).

Stem cells

Spore-like cells

The idea for what would later be called STAP cells ("stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency") came from Vacanti, who with his brother Martin, known as Marty, believed that adult mammalian tissues contained tiny pluripotent cells that were released when the tissue was injured or stressed.

Charles had persuaded Marty, a pathologist, to move from Nebraska to work with him in 1996, and he asked Marty if he could find adult stem cells as an alternative to standard adult cells, which quickly die in culture, and fetal cells, which are controversial to use. and reported that these cells could survive anoxic conditions for days and that they were able to grow a variety of tissues including pancreas and lung from isolated spore-like cells. and then in January 2014 the journal Nature published two articles suggesting that a simple acid treatment could cause mouse blood cells to become pluripotent. However, Vacanti felt that his Harvard team did not get due credit for the origin of the work. and said "We believe that this is exactly what happens in the body during attempts to repair any damaged or diseased tissue". Vacanti said in 2012 he had used the technique to grow a replacement trachea using autologous cells from a patient. John Rasko and Carl Power writing in The Guardian noted that although Vacanti's colleague Obokata and others at RIKEN took most of the blame for the STAP cell retractions, Vacanti himself "did almost as much to confuse the issue of replication as Obokata herself" by claiming to be able to replicate the results and providing 'recipes' (on his website ) to produce STAP cells in March and September 2014, which no other researchers could reproduce.

Vacanti's lab closed and he retired in 2015 following the STAP scandal, but as of 2016 he continued to believe in the principle of stress-induced pluripotency.

Works

Personal life Vacanti was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the second brother in a Sicilian family with eight children; his parents were Charles J. Vacanti and JoAnne K Vacanti (née Franco). His father was a Professor of Dentistry at Creighton University (which Vacanti also later attended) and an early worker in root canal surgery, and his mother studied Chemistry pre-med at university until she was married. His other brother Carl has Down syndrome.