Charles Vacanti

Charles Alfred Vacanti (born 1949/50) is a researcher in tissue engineering^[1] and Professor of Anesthesiology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School. He is a former head of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

He is known for the Vacanti mouse, a mouse created with Linda Griffith and Joseph Upton with cartilage shaped like a human ear on its back, and for being the senior author on the first of two retracted articles on STAP cells, a concept proposed by his brother and himself, and co-authored with Haruko Obokata. Vacanti stood down as department chair of Brigham and Women's Hospital and took a one-year sabbatical from September 1, 2014.^[2]

Tissue engineering

In 1989, Vacanti first grew human cartilage in vitro on a biodegradable scaffold.^[3] After refining the techniques and building on the work of Robert Langer at MIT, in 1997 Vacanti and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts grew a cartilage structure resembling a human ear on the back of a nude mouse, using a polymer scaffold and cow knee chondrocyte cells.^[4][3][5] Vacanti and his brother Joseph used the same technique to grow a chest plate for a 12-year-old boy who had been born without cartilage or bone over his left lung.^[3] In 1998, the team at Massachusetts led by Vacanti grew a replacement thumb bone using a scaffold of coral for a man whose thumb had been crushed.^[6]

Vacanti says that he coined the term tissue engineering in 1991 in the context of organ replacement, though it had been used earlier for other uses^[7] and his coining is disputed (for example, the term was used in 1984 in the same context by an ophthalmic surgeon).^[8]

STAP cells

The idea for what would later be called STAP cells ("stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency") came from Vacanti, who with his brother Martin believed that adult mammalian tissues contained tiny pluripotent cells that were released when the tissue was injured or stressed. Martin first identified them in rat brain tissue that he had sliced and forced through small tubes. They published work in 2001 describing these "spore-like cells".^[9][1] Charles continued to work on these cells when he moved to Harvard, including with thoracic surgeon Koji Kojima who identified them in lung tissue.^[10] Working with a graduate student Haruko Obokata in his lab at Harvard from 2008, Charles later refined this theory to suggest that stress or injury could actually trigger the development of pluripotency in somatic cells. He first proposed this to Obokata and Masayuki Yamato at a conference in Florida in 2010; Yamato had independently come to the same conclusion. Obokata returned to Japan and continued this work at RIKEN.^[11] Vacanti presented these results in July 2012 at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists conference,^[12] 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.^[11] The Boston Globe reported that "His discovery is a reminder that as specialized as science is, sometimes, a little ignorance may be a virtue. A stem-cell expert would probably never have even bothered to try the experiment Vacanti has been pursuing, on and off, since the late 1990s."^[10] Vacanti claimed that February to have replicated the effect in human skin fibroblast cells,^[13] and said "We believe that this is exactly what happens in the body during attempts to repair any damaged or diseased tissue".^[14] Vacanti said in 2012 he had used the technique to grow a replacement trachea using autologous cells from a patient.^[12]

Both STAP articles were retracted in July 2014 after an investigation by RIKEN concluded that the data were fabricated. Despite eventually agreeing with the retractions, Vacanti stated that "there has been no information that cast doubt on the existence of the stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cell phenomenon itself."^[15][16] 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^[17]) to produce STAP cells in March and September 2014, which no other researchers could reproduce.^[11]

Education and career

Vacanti gained his B.A. from Creighton University in 1968 and his M.D. from University of Nebraska College of Medicine in 1975,^[18] 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.^[19][20]

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.^[21] He was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha in 2002.^[22]

In September 2002, Vacanti joined Brigham and Women's Hospital, succeeding Simon Gelman as department chair for Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine.^[21]

He has published over 200 articles, abstracts, and books.^[23] He co-founded the Tissue Engineering Society,^[21] and holds a number of patents related to stem cells.^[24] He was President of the Society of Academic Anesthesiology Chairs in 2007-8.^[23]

Personal life

Vacanti was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the second brother in a Sicilian family; his parents were Charles J Vacanti and JoAnne K Vacanti (née Franco).^[25][1] 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 at university until she was married. He married Linda K Vacanti in the mid-70s, now living with her in Uxbridge, Massachusetts.^[25] She was an administrator for the Tissue Engineering Society.^[7] He was interested in engineering as a child, and became an anesthesiologist due to an interest in the equipment.^[24] He has four brothers and three sisters: his elder brother Dr. Joseph P. Vacanti (considered one of the "fathers of tissue engineering"), and his younger brothers Dr. Martin P. Vacanti and Dr. Francis X. Vacanti are all medical researchers;^[1] collectively, they have been called the "first family of tissue engineering".^[24] His other brother has Down syndrome.^[1]

Works

• Charles Vacanti; Scott Segal; Pankaj Sikka; Richard Urman, eds. (August 2011). Essential Clinical Anesthesia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521720205. 
• Vacanti, Charles A.; Vacanti, Joseph P. (1991). Braverman, MH; Tawes, RL, eds. "Functional organ replacement: The new technology of tissue engineering". Surgery Technology International. 

References

External links

• Official website
• List of patents held by Charles Vacanti