A refined protocol for generating so-called STAP cells was posted Thursday on a researcher website for Brigham and Women's Hospital, which is where a co-author of controversial papers on potentially groundbreaking stem cell research works.
"We have found this to be an effective protocol for generating STAP cells in our lab, regardless of the cell type being studied," according to the introduction to the post, whose author was not specified.
Charles Vacanti of Harvard Medical School is currently affiliated with the hospital. He is a former adviser to Japanese researcher Haruko Obokata, who led a group of authors who wrote two papers on "stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency," or STAP.