Hint of Hope for STAP cells but Hong Kong Researchers says interesting result is only double and needs to be 10 to 100 fold

LA Times reports that just hours after Japanese investigators announced findings of fabrication and misconduct in a highly criticized “acid bath” stem cell study, scientists in Hong Kong said they had partly succeeded in reproducing the controversial experiment, but without acid.

Kenneth Ka-Ho Lee, a professor and stem cell scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said Tuesday that he was shocked speechless when he and colleagues managed to create cells that appeared similar to the so-called STAP cells described in the much-discredited research papers.

Lee initially attempted to reprogram mouse blood cells into pluripotent stem cells — cells capable of transforming into most any other type of cell — using the original study’s protocol, but failed.

When one of the original study’s authors, Dr. Charles Vacanti of Harvard affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, released another protocol for the experiment, Lee said he would try that one as well.

The Vacanti recipe for “stimulus triggered acquisition of pluripotency,” or STAP cells, calls for soaking the cells in an acid bath, but also passing them through extremely narrow glass tubes, or pipettes. (The diameter of the narrowest glass tubes is about 2.5 times the size of the cells themselves.)

Kenneth Ka-Ho Lee and his colleagues are reporting and discussing their results at Researchgate.ent

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