Catherine Verfaillie

Explore about the Famous Physician Catherine Verfaillie, who was born in Belgium on April 22, 1957. Analyze Catherine Verfaillie’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Catherine Verfaillie dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Catherine Verfaillie?

Catherine Verfaillie Biography

Catherine M. Verfaillie (Dutch: [vərfɑi] ; born in Ypres, 1957) obtained an M.D. from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1982. After graduation, she specialized in internal medicine and in 1987. Currently she works as a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Leuven, Belgium). Her work on the ability of adult stem cells to differentiate to different cell types has garnered controversy due to accusations of poor laboratory practices and fabrication of data by members of her laboratory. In 2019 it was shown that several of her more recent paper also contained altered images and potential fraud was committed.

After her specialization in internal medicine she departed for the United States as a research fellow at the University of Minnesota where she worked in the lab of Phillip McGlave in hematopoiesis and stromal control of hematopoietic stem cells, in 1991 becoming a professor in the Department of Medicine, becoming a full professor in 1997. Verfaillie later became the director of the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Minnesota (U.S.) from 1998 until 2006. In a widely noted paper in 2002, she claimed a specific type of adult-derived stem cells (termed multipotent adult progenitor cells (MAPC)). She is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation of the University of Minnesota’s Medical School. She holds the Anderson Chair in Stem Cell Biology and the McKnight’s Presidential Chair in Stem Cell Biology. She now leads the Stamcel Instituut te Leuven (SCIL, Stem Cell Institute Leuven) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Itinera Institute think-tank.

In response to the investigation at the University of Minnesota, Nature instituted their own investigation to the 2002 controversial paper and Verfaillie was allowed to make a Corrigendum to the original paper, which did not acknowledge fabrication of data, and claimed that the original observation still held. The issue raised by Rudolf Jaenisch and others regarding the non-reproducibility of the blastocyst injection data was not addressed by the reviewers of Verfaillie. In early 2010, a third paper by the group in the American Journal of Cell Physiology was withdrawn due to “data presented have now been shown to be unreliable. This was again prompted by an investigation by New Scientist.

The panel criticized Verfaillie’s laboratory for “poor scientific method and inadequate training and oversight for this research”. It contacted Blood and asked the journal to retract the paper. The investigators also found discrepancies with images in a second paper from Verfaillie’s laboratory, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2002. Those problems did not rise to the level of academic misconduct, the university said. It did not find fault directly with Verfaillie, but Tim Mulcahy concluded that the “message here is that everyone needs to fulfill their responsibility to the public and to science”.

Verfaillie moved to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven at the height of the controversy in 2006 but retained her position at the University of Minnesota. She has continued to defend her work and gave a list of publications that have proven the utility of MAPCs, albeit without addressing the criticisms of how the key parts of her work could not be reproduced by other labs. In 2007, she collaborated with Irving Weissman at Stanford University to demonstrate that MAPCs could produce blood cells although she did not address the key claims of her original 2002 paper.

The same article also quoted Orkin as saying that the material transfer agreement (MTA) for procuring these cells were so restrictive that his group refused to work with them. First reports on potential problems with Verfaillie’s group’s work came in early 2007 when New Scientist reported that the 2002 Nature paper had some of the images appear in a second paper published at about the same time. The article also revealed duplication of images in a 2001 paper on blood, authored by Verfaillie’s trainee, Morayma Reyes, and that a patent application for the MAPCs was licensed to a company called Athersys, based in Cleveland, Ohio. A series of investigations into at least three instances of data duplication/fabrication by the University of Minnesota followed, which eventually concluded in October 2008 that Morayma Reyes had fabricated data in the 2001 paper.

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