To date, no one has filed a complaint regarding the death of the scientist Franc Llorens, who died in July 2022, at the age of 45, allegedly after contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Last week, El País reported how in the laboratory of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell) where the scientist worked, hundreds of biological samples of unknown origin with prions, a type of protein that can cause neurodegenerative diseases.
The news caused great consternation in the scientific community and raised many questions about how, when and from where these samples had arrived at the laboratory, which was not approved to carry out experiments with prions. The matter was debated at a meeting of the Mossos d'Esquadra leadership, which agreed to transfer the matter to the Prosecutor's Office so that it would be the public ministry that would decide whether or not the police would open investigation proceedings into a particularly complex case.
To advance work, the police have determined that the general criminal investigation police station is in charge of trying to clarify what happened and also specifying whether or not there were crimes. And within that police station those in charge would be the police officers from the central consumer unit. Because they? Because they are researchers who have a regular relationship with the scientific sector; Therefore, they know better a subject of great complexity.
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 currently an investigation underway to clarify how and when these samples arrived at Idibell, and where they came from. A work that has been initiated by the University of Barcelona, owner of the space in which the laboratory is located, and in which the Idibell and the Networked Biomedical Research Center (Ciber) of the Ministry of Science participate in a coordinated manner, which is the had hired the deceased scientist.
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 the nine people who worked in the laboratory, who fear that they may have been exposed to high-risk situations without adequate protection.
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.
Specifically, the Idibell biosafety committee did not authorize three projects to research with prions before Llorens' arrival, Gabriel Capellà, director of the institute, reported last week. This committee is responsible for evaluating the biological risks of the facilities and the activities carried out.
Llorens stopped working in November 2020, when he began to have neurological symptoms that could correspond to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. But to this day, 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 already an anomaly. It was the neuropathologist Isidre Ferrer, Llorens' boss at Idibell, who discovered them and immediately informed his superiors.
The laboratory was closed a few hours later and decontaminated in January 2021. The samples were sent to CReSA. Many of them were from cerebrospinal fluid from people with Creutzfeldt-Jakob and other neurodegenerative diseases, and others came from animals. With the information available so far, it is still unclear whether experiments with prions were carried out at Idibell or not.
