The Mossos d’Esquadra have opened an investigation to clarify the causes of the death of a scientist who was studying Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in laboratory 4141 of the University of Barcelona. The biochemist died in 2022, at the age of 45, after showing symptoms compatible with the disease he was investigating, which was transmissible and lethal. The Mossos are investigating the causes of death after EL PAÍS revealed that thousands of unauthorized samples, some of them potentially infectious, have been found in his laboratory. The scientist, assigned to the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), had a contract with the public consortium CIBER, dependent on the Ministry of Science.
Police sources explain that the investigation is in a very initial phase. The first step is to verify the official cause of death of the man, who was admitted to the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona and decided to keep his diagnosis a secret. At the hands of the central consumer unit, which is in charge of possible crimes against public health, the intention of the Catalan police is to also request all the information held by IDIBELL, which in turn has opened an internal investigation along with the other two institutions involved.
The biochemist began to feel unwell in November 2020 and requested leave. The person in charge of laboratory 4141, the professor Isidre Ferrer, then found thousands of unauthorized samples in a freezer and immediately reported it to his superiors. The three institutions, however, took two years to send the suspicious samples for analysis to a specialized center, the CIC bioGUNEin the Basque town of Derio.
The results of these analyses, to which EL PAÍS has had access, show that in the freezer there was brain and cerebellum tissue from people who died with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The scientist and his partner were investigating the presence of characteristic substances in human cerebrospinal fluid, useful for the diagnosis of rapid dementia. They were not authorized to work there with these liquid samples, much less with the solid samples of brain tissue, which are more infective. Of the 84 samples that were sent for analysis, 11 of cerebrospinal fluid and another dozen of brain or cerebellar tissue were potentially infective. Many of them were labeled with a sticker with the letters CJD, which stands for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
This pathology, known by its animal equivalent of mad cow, is caused by abnormal proteins called prions and has an incubation period that can last several years. French scientist Émilie Jaumain, 33, died in June 2019 after accidentally pricking his finger a decade earlier, in an experiment with infected mice in his laboratory at the National Institute for Research in Agriculture, Food and the Environment, on the outskirts of Paris.
The now deceased Spanish biochemist joined laboratory 4141 in January 2018, as a principal investigator with his own group, which his partner joined months later. The scientist was previously, between 2013 and 2017, in Germany, assigned to two institutions: the Göttingen University Medical Center and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. With these two affiliations he signed a multitude of studies on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but the scientific director of the second institution, Pierluigi Nicotera, states that they do not work with human prions in their laboratories. “We can reasonably exclude that a human prion infection occurred in the past within the laboratories of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Göttingen,” maintains the manager. The person in charge of the other German institution, Inga Zerr, does not respond to repeated messages from this newspaper. Zerr is a leading researcher in the study of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Before his time in Germany, the now deceased scientist also worked with prions a decade ago in a high-security laboratory at the Bellvitge University Hospital, dependent on IDIBELL and dismantled in 2017. It was 200 meters from laboratory 4141, located in the Faculty of Medicine, in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. Brain tissue samples from patients with Creutzfeldt-Jakob from Bellvitge were then transferred to the Hospital Clínic and the Animal Health Research Center (CReSA), in the Barcelona town of Bellaterra. However, a handful of them appeared in the freezer of laboratory 4141, with no record of entry. They are samples that could have been used as a reference in the analysis of other biological materials with prion diseases.
The three institutions are now investigating whether these samples were handled in laboratory 4141, which lacked biosafety measures. The public consortium CIBER signed an agreement in 2018 so that the group could work with these high-risk samples in the CReSA high-security laboratory. There was no reason to have dangerous material in laboratory 4141, except to supposedly save time in the experiments, since the CReSA bunker is 30 kilometers away and it was necessary to make an appointment to use it, according to sources from the institutions involved.
The doctor Gabriel Capella, director of IDIBELL, explained to this newspaper that “a maximum of eight people” worked in laboratory 4141 in the period in which there were unauthorized dangerous samples, in addition to the deceased and Isidre Ferrer. The security office of the University of Barcelona and the IDIBELL prevention service judged that there was “an intolerable risk” for laboratory colleagues, although there is no evidence that any work accident occurred. Sara González, vice president of the Spanish Foundation for Prion Diseases, emphasizes that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is not contagious in the usual sense of the word, but it can be transmitted in very specific circumstances, such as a puncture in a laboratory or the ingestion of tissue contaminated by prions. The other workers at laboratory 4141 have declared that they were unaware of the existence of the infective samples and have reported “a state of permanent anguish”, given “the doubt of whether they may suffer the same process in a few years from uncontrolled contamination.” , according to the minutes of a meeting with the director of the Department of Pathology at the University of Barcelona, Carles Solsonaon December 22, 2020.
Do you have more information about this case or other similar ones? You can write to us at [email protected]. Follow SUBJECT in Facebook, x, instagram or subscribe here to our bulletin.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Mossos #investigate #death #scientist #studying #lethal #disease #Barcelona