29 Facts About Charles Vacanti

Charles Vacanti is a former head of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts and Brigham and Women's Hospital, now retired.

Charles Vacanti is known for the Vacanti mouse, a mouse created with Linda Griffith and Joseph Upton with cartilage shaped like a human ear on its back, and for being the senior author on the first of two retracted articles on STAP cells, a concept proposed by his brother and himself, and co-authored with Haruko Obokata.

Charles Vacanti was a research associate at MIT and the Children's Hospital Boston, and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Charles Vacanti became chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and a Professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Charles Vacanti was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha in 2002.

In September 2002, Charles Vacanti joined Brigham and Women's Hospital, succeeding Simon Gelman as department chair for Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine.

Charles Vacanti has published over 200 articles, abstracts, and books.

Charles Vacanti co-founded the Tissue Engineering Society, and holds a number of patents related to stem cells.

In 1989, Charles Vacanti first grew a piece of human cartilage in vitro on a biodegradable scaffold; the work was rejected from a "top journal" as it was said to have "no practical implications".

Surprised by this, Charles Vacanti gathered from colleagues that the most difficult cartilagenous replacement was the ear.

Charles 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.

In 1998, the team at Massachusetts led by Charles Vacanti grew a replacement thumb bone using a scaffold of coral for a man, Raul Murcia, whose thumb had been crushed.

Charles Vacanti says that he coined the term tissue engineering in 1991 in the context of organ replacement, though it had been used earlier for other uses and his coining is disputed.

Charles Vacanti had persuaded Marty, a pathologist, to move from Nebraska to work with him in 1996, and he asked Marty if he could find adult stem cells as an alternative to standard adult cells, which quickly die in culture, and fetal cells, which are controversial to use.

Charles Vacanti was motivated to work on stem cells by the desire to treat his brother's Down syndrome.

Charles Vacanti continued to work on these cells when he moved to Harvard, including with thoracic surgeon Koji Kojima who identified them in lung tissue.

Charles Vacanti recruited a graduate student, Haruko Obokata, in his lab at Harvard from 2008, and she worked on the spore-like cells and made them the focus of her thesis; Obokata achieved growing the cells into teratomas, which Charles Vacanti had not.

Charles Vacanti 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.

Charles Vacanti first proposed this to Obokata and Masayuki Yamato at a conference in Florida in 2010; Yamato had independently come to the same conclusion.

Charles Vacanti initially proposed the use of ATP as an energy source for the injured cells.

Charles Vacanti then returned to Japan and continued this work at RIKEN.

Charles Vacanti was excluded from the development of a stem cell line by Obokata in collaboration with Yoshiki Sasai.

Charles Vacanti presented these results in July 2012 at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists conference, 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.

Charles Vacanti said in 2012 he had used the technique to grow a replacement trachea using autologous cells from a patient.

Charles Vacanti's lab closed and he retired in 2015 following the STAP scandal, but as of 2016 he continued to believe in the principle of stress-induced pluripotency.

Charles Vacanti's father was a Professor of Dentistry at Creighton University and an early worker in root canal surgery, and his mother studied Chemistry pre-med at university until she was married.

Charles Vacanti's father died of a heart attack in 1994 and Charles has experienced heart problems.

Charles Vacanti was interested in engineering as a child, and became an anesthesiologist due to an interest in the equipment.

Charles Vacanti has four brothers and three sisters: his elder brother Dr Joseph P Vacanti, and his younger brothers Dr Martin P Vacanti and Dr Francis X Vacanti are all medical researchers; they are "very competitive" and collectively, they have been called the "first family of tissue engineering".