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E-mailPitt claims to have cloned cells of monkeys
University of Pittsburgh researchers are fairly confident they have generated embryonic stem cells from cloned monkeys, a feat that could put science once step closer to creating human stem cells to treat diseases and propel the university to the forefront of the international cloning field.
Pitt's findings, confirmed Wednesday by a university spokeswoman, have not been examined and verified by independent scientists, a crucial step toward determining their validity.
But if true, the accomplishment could lead to the ultimate prize in biomedical research -- the creation of stem cell lines from cloned human embryos to treat diseases such as Parkinson's or diabetes.
If and when an outside review of the purported findings will take place remains unknown.
Pitt had planned to submit a manuscript of the findings to the prestigious British journal Nature, but that never happened because a former Pitt scientist involved in the research, Jong Hyuk Park, was found by Pitt and federal regulators to have falsified two figures in the paper.
Park's misrepresentation of the data, which took place in fall 2005, led the federal Office of Research Integrity to declare this week that Park had engaged in scientific misconduct.
The researcher's misconduct, however, has not stopped Pitt from carrying on the project under the direction of Gerald Schatten, a reproductive biologist who last year was embroiled in a major stem cell scandal.
"The team is fairly confident in the scientific findings," Pitt spokeswoman Lisa Rossi said yesterday.
But the scientific team has opted to repeat all of the experiments that produced the stem cell lines from the cloned monkeys in order to obtain new data and scientific verification without involvement from Park, Rossi said.
She did not know when the new research would be completed and cautioned it has not been submitted for peer review.
"This work represents a major scientific finding, but it has not yet been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal," Rossi said.
Schatten, who has not spoken publicly since the scandal unfolded last year, was not available for comment, Rossi said.
Schatten was the senior author of a 2005 scientific paper claiming to have custom-designed stem cells for individual patients from cloned human embryos.
That research, led by veterinarian Hwang Woo-Suk at Seoul National University in South Korea, was later found to be fraudulent by Korean investigators who determined researchers had faked some of the data.
Schatten's involvement in the fraudulent South Korean research is enough to cast skepticism about the latest breakthrough involving the cloned monkeys, said Dr. Arthur Kriegstein, director of the Program in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology and a professor of neurology at University of California, San Francisco.
"The fact that Gerald Schatten's name is involved raises significant questions," Kriegstein said. "It's not a first where there's been deliberate fraud in this area, so this is just very suspicious. This finding may or may not exist."
If it ever were to exist, Kriegstein said, it would be significant because no team of scientists has ever been successful in producing stem cells from cloned human embryos.
"Being able to do this in a non-human primate would be a significant step in that direction," he said. "It would bring us that much closer to the likelihood of doing (cloning) in humans."
Pitt has stood by Schatten despite his involvement in the scandal and yesterday Rossi emphasized that it was Schatten who first began to question Park's work in fall 2005.
A Pitt investigative panel ruled last April that Schatten likely did not know the Korean researchers fabricated their data, but censured him for shirking his scientific responsibilities while seeking professional and financial gains from the high-profile research.
Park, a post-doctoral fellow who started working at Pitt in August 2004, left Pitt last February, two months before the internal panel recommended that he be fired. Prior to coming to Pittsburgh, he was a member of Hwang Woo-Suk's team and co-author of two articles in the journal Science that were later retracted.
The federal Office of Research Integrity said this week it has barred Park for three years from working with any U.S. government agency in any capacity.
Stem cell lines created from cloned monkeys are mentioned on various federal documents acquired by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review through a Freedom of Information Act request and submitted more than a year ago to the federal National Institutes of Health.
These documents include letters submitted by Schatten to the NIH as part of an application for a $16.1 million grant.
The NIH awarded the grant to Schatten in September 2005 to launch an ambitious stem cell program based at the Pitt-affiliated Magee-Womens Research Institute in Oakland.
Rossi said yesterday none of the falsified data created by Park was part of the documents submitted to the NIH in order to win the grant.
"None of the research results containing the misrepresented figures that were in the draft were used in any grant application," she said.
NIH officials could not be reached late yesterday.
Luis Fabre
