The Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell) denied authorization to three scientific projects with prions, a type of proteins that can cause neurodegenerative diseases, for not meeting the appropriate safety conditions in its facilities, reported yesterday Gabriel Capellà, director of the Institute.
However, hundreds of biological samples of unknown origin have appeared in an Idibell laboratory where Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, caused by prions, was being investigated, and these infectious proteins have been identified in some of the samples analyzed, as reported yesterday by El País. .
One of the scientists who ran the laboratory, Franc Llorens, died in July 2022, at age 45, presumably after contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Llorens' disease, which arrived at Idibell in 2018 from the University of Göttingen (Germany), and the discovery of potentially infectious unregistered samples, have caused concern among people who worked in the laboratory, who fear they have been exposed. to high-risk situations without adequate protection.
The samples are now kept in the Animal Health Research Center (CReSA), on the campus of the Universitat Autònoma (UAB), which has a high security laboratory to work with dangerous viruses and prions. There is an ongoing investigation to clarify how and when they arrived at Idibell, and where they came from. Once it is finished, towards the end of the year or early 2024, it will be decided whether to modify the Idibell security protocols.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a rapidly evolving degenerative neurological pathology. It is fatal in 100% of cases and there is no treatment to stop its progression. It is characterized by rapid deterioration of brain tissue caused by a prion, a defective protein that spreads like an infection. Most cases are sporadic. Only a minority are due to contagion.
It was the Idibell biosafety committee that did not authorize three projects to research with prions before Llorens' arrival, Gabriel Capellà informed La Vanguardia yesterday. This committee is responsible for evaluating the biological risks of the facilities and the activities carried out at the center.
In December 2018, shortly after the neuroscientist joined, Idibell signed a collaboration agreement with CReSA to be able to carry out this type of research with appropriate safety conditions.
Llorens stopped working in November 2020, when he began to have neurological symptoms that could correspond to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Idibell has no record of his diagnosis.
In December 2020, biological samples of unknown origin were found preserved at 80 degrees below zero in the Llorens laboratory. The samples were not registered in the laboratory databases, which was an anomaly. It was the neuropathologist Isidre Ferrer, Llorens' boss at Idibell, who discovered them and immediately informed the institute's management.
The laboratory was closed a few hours later and decontaminated in January 2021. The samples were sent to CReSA at that time. Many of them were from cerebrospinal fluid from people with Creutzfeldt-Jakob and other neurodegenerative diseases, and others came from animals.
Idibell decided to address the case jointly with the University of Barcelona, owner of the laboratory, and the Networked Biomedical Research Center (Ciber) of the Ministry of Science, which is the one who had hired Llorens.
At the end of 2022, two years after the samples were found, a part was sent to the CIC BioGune center in the Basque Country, which has prion analysis technology. The result of the analysis confirmed, in March 2023, the presence of prions, which implies that one of the other nine people who worked in the laboratory could have been at risk of contagion if they handled samples with prions without knowing it. With the information available so far, it is not clear whether experiments with prions were carried out at Idibell or not.
