Scientist who created STAP stem cells says studies should be withdrawn

A number of scientists have been grumbling for weeks about a pair of breakthrough stem cell studies that seemed too good to be true. Now one of the senior researchers who worked on the papers agrees that they may be right.

The studies, which were published in January by the journal Nature, described a surprisingly simple method of transforming mature cells into pluripotent stem cells capable of regenerating any type of tissue in the body. The key was to stress them out by soaking them in an acid bath for 30 minutes, prompting genetic changes that made the cells more flexible. The researchers dubbed their technique stimulus triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP.

But Teruhiko Wakayama, a senior author of one of the papers and coauthor on the other, said he had lost confidence in the studies and was "no longer sure the STAP cells were actually created, according to NHK.

Wakayama, a professor at the University of Yamanashi in Kofu, Japan, told Japanese media Monday that he had asked his collaborators to withdraw the studies until the results could be verified by independent scientists. He added that he is ready to provide cell samples and detailed data to anyone who is willing to try, NHK reported.

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Wakayama also echoed concerns raised by others that some of the images used in the Nature papers may have been published previously. According to Japan News, an English-language website from Yomiuri Shimbun, Wakayama said the images look almost identical to images that appear in the PhD thesis of Haruko Obokata, the lead author of both Nature studies. Her thesis was about pluripotent stem cells in humans, but the cells in the Nature STAP paper were supposedly from mice.

Anonymous posters to a website called PubPeer have flagged several images in the Nature papers that they say look suspiciously like pictures in a 2011 study led by Obokata. That study, published in the journal Tissue Engineering, purports to show that cells removed from various tissues of adult mice could be coaxed to grow into other kinds of cells.

Duplicated images arent the only problem skeptics have flagged. A Japanese blog post has noted striking similarities in the words used to describe some of the methods used in one of the Nature papers and the words in a 2005 paper published in a journal called In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology Animal. In the blog post, the overlapping language is highlighted in red.

There sure seems to be a lot of overlap in text in the two papers, Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at UC Davis, wrote on his blog.

Ive heard people react to this by saying 'no big deal, its just a methods section,' while Ive heard others say 'this is misconduct,' Knoepfler added. Im sure many people fall somewhere in the middle.

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Scientist who created STAP stem cells says studies should be withdrawn