Charles Alfred "Chuck"[1] Vacanti (born 1950) is a researcher in tissue engineering[2] and stem cells and the Vandam/Covino Professor of Anesthesiology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School.
[9] In September 2002, Vacanti joined Brigham and Women's Hospital, succeeding Simon Gelman as department chair for Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine.
[8] Following the STAP cells controversy, Vacanti stood down as department chair at Brigham and Women's Hospital and took a one-year sabbatical from September 1, 2014,[10] then retired in 2015.
[11] In 1989, Vacanti first grew a piece of human cartilage in vitro on a biodegradable scaffold;[14] the work was rejected from a "top journal" as it was said to have "no practical implications".
[1] After refining the techniques and building on the work of Robert Langer at MIT, in 1997 Vacanti and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts controversially and with much media attention grew a cartilage structure resembling a human ear on the back of a nude mouse - dubbed the Earmouse,[11] Auriculosaurus[1] or Vacanti mouse - using a polymer scaffold and cow knee chondrocyte cells.
[14][15][16] Vacanti and his brother Joseph successfully used the same technique to grow a chest plate for a 12-year-old boy, Sean McCormack, who had been born without cartilage or bone over his heart and left lung.
Charles continued to work on these cells when he moved to Harvard, including with thoracic surgeon Koji Kojima who identified them in lung tissue.
[11] Charles later refined this theory to suggest that stress or injury could actually trigger the development of pluripotency in somatic cells, and initially kept this idea from Obokata.
Vacanti presented these results in July 2012 at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists conference,[23] 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] Vacanti claimed that February to have replicated the effect in human skin fibroblast cells,[24] and said "We believe that this is exactly what happens in the body during attempts to repair any damaged or diseased tissue".
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.
"[26][27] 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[28]) to produce STAP cells in March and September 2014, which no other researchers could reproduce.