The neuroscientist Franc Llorens, who was researching Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and died in July 2022 at the age of 45, presumably after contracting this disease, was responsible for personally introducing high-risk biological samples into the laboratory of the Institut d'Investigació. Biomèdica de Bellvitge (Idibell), without registering his entry and without notifying his superiors. The information has been confirmed to La Vanguardia by two independent sources aware of what happened in that scientific facility and which is now the subject of a police investigation.
The scientist also carried out experiments with some of these potentially infectious samples despite the fact that the laboratory did not, and does not, meet the appropriate safety conditions and therefore was not authorized for these experiments. Hence, the work of the deceased not only put the rest of the scientists at risk, but also the maintenance or cleaning personnel who accessed the laboratory.
The samples corresponded to brain tissue and cerebrospinal fluid from people and other animals affected by neurodegenerative diseases such as, among others, Creutzfeldt-Jakob. Remains that came mainly from the universities of Göttingen, in Germany, where Llorens had worked from 2013 to 2018, and Coimbra, in Portugal.
The presence of these samples in one of the freezers of laboratory 1414 was discovered at the end of 2020, when Llorens requested medical leave after developing neurological symptoms characteristic of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The director of the laboratory, Isidre Ferrer, accessed one of these refrigerators, saw samples with an unequivocal notation on the bottle, CJD, which are the initials of the disease in English, and learned from the stories of the rest of the scientists in the research group that Llorens directed and the annotations of the computers in the laboratory that could contain prions.
Both the Idibell management and the University of Barcelona (UB), owner of the space where the laboratory is located, were informed of the discovery. The Network Biomedical Research Center (CIBER), of the Ministry of Science, was also informed that it had hired Llorens to return to Spain and work at Idibell. None of the three institutions related to the serious incident, Idibell, UB and CIBER, have publicly clarified to date why two years had to pass between the discovery of the potentially dangerous samples in the Llorens laboratory and their sending to the CIC center. BioGune from the Basque Country to analyze them. It was in that laboratory where it was confirmed that they had prions and therefore could be infective.
The neuroscientist had continued to be affiliated with the University of Göttingen after joining Idibell in 2018. A common practice in the scientific community, where many researchers have dual affiliations. Llorens traveled to Göttingen several times between 2018 and 2020 and continued to author his scientific articles in collaboration with the team of Inga Zerr, his boss in Germany. Some of them were also signed in collaboration with neuroscientists from the University of Coimbra.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob is a rapidly evolving neurodegenerative disease caused by prions, a type of proteins that destroy brain tissue and make holes in it like a sponge – hence, it is called spongiform encephalopathy. There is no treatment to stop its progression and it causes death in 100% of patients, usually about six months after diagnosis. The vast majority of cases are sporadic.
It can be contagious in rare cases if a person is exposed to material from the nervous system or cornea affected by prions. But it is not transmitted between people by respiratory, skin, sexual, or blood transfusions.
The Bellvitge hospital specialized in prion research following the mad cow crisis in the 1990s and continued with this line of research once the emergency was resolved. It set up a laboratory with a biosafety level 3 (on a scale of 1 to 4), which allowed samples containing prions to be handled under highly secure conditions. Franc Llorens already worked in that Bellvitge laboratory before leaving for Germany in 2013, under the direction of the neuropathologist Isidre Ferrer.
The Bellvitge biosafety laboratory was closed when Ferrer retired from his job at the hospital after turning 65 in 2016. At that time, a portion of the samples with prions were transferred to the Clínic hospital and the rest to the IRTA-Cresa institute, in the campus of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in Bellaterra. In Bellvitge there were none left.
Ferrer's research group was established at the Idibell Institute since, as a professor, he could delay his retirement from the university until he was 70 and continue researching until then. That was where Llorens ended up upon returning from Germany in 2018. Llorens, who had a brilliant scientific career and was due to succeed Ferrer as head of the research group, had complete freedom to investigate without supervision.
At that time it had been agreed that the Idibell research with prions would be carried out at the IRTA-Cresa facilities, an agreement that was published in the Official State Gazette. If the Idibell team received samples with prions for research, they had to send them to IRTA-Cresa without unsealing them. It was not prohibited to keep the samples in the Idibell but you could not work with them there.
After Llorens fell ill, biological samples were discovered that had been opened in a freezer in his laboratory. Some of them had a label with the initials CJD. People who worked under Llorens declared that they had manipulated those samples and that they had not been informed of the risk they ran. Three years later, at least one of those people is still on sick leave and undergoing psychological treatment.
