Real journal, fake credentials

The ongoing scandal in the medical publishing world took on a new twist today with news that Chiming Wei, founder and editor of a journal on the fledgling field of nanotechnology, appears to have exaggerated his credentials -- claiming to head a program at Johns Hopkins University that doesn't exist and starting a professional society with himself as president and chairman.

Indeed, an investigation of his credentials reveals that he claimed to hold a directorship of a non-existent program, co-authored only two original papers in Nanomedicine (one of which, a co-author says, he contributed to only editorially), and was accused of mismanaging the professional society to the point that some board members resigned and began a new professional group.

"I think that this individual is a good example of a field that is poorly- or under-regulated," Summer Johnson, executive editor of The American Journal of Bioethics, told The Scientist. "Everyone trusted the fact that he appeared to have high quality credentials."

Chiming Wei, president and founder of an organization called the American Academy of Nanomedicine (AANM), has the equivalent of a PhD from a Japanese institution and is a researcher in cardiothoracic surgery, but is not currently affiliated with any university. He started the group in 2005, when he was an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. The AANM's website lists Wei as Director of the Cardiothoracic-Renal Nanomedicine Program at Johns Hopkins, but according to the university, there is no such program. The Johns Hopkins press office was "unable to find evidence that this program exists," a university spokesperson wrote in an email.

Wei was also accused by experts in the field of adding his name to their journal articles, without permission or contributing in a meaningful way to the articles, in order to bolster his credentials.

Wei denied the accusations.

The journal, Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine, was established by Elsevier four years ago at Wei's urging.

The Scientist reports that Elsevier, however, did not check Wei's credentials before installing him as editor of a peer reviewed journal.

An Elsevier spokesperson said the publisher never checked Wei's publication record in nanomedicine before giving him the job of editing a nanomedicine journal. "Based on the discussions we didn't feel a need to read through [Wei's] papers, as he was quite knowledgeable on the subject," the Elsevier spokesperson added.

Elsevier has been at the centre of a controversy in recent weeks after revelations that it published several journals that were little more than paid promotional items for pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co.

Pharma publishing wrap-up

I have been blogging about reports of publishing scandals in the pharmaceutical industry of late, and today published a story in the Toronto Star  wrapping up some of them.

From the creation of fake academic journals, to bogus stories submitted to real journals, to falsified results in some of academia's most respected publications – the pharmaceutical industry has been rocked by allegations that the world's biggest drug companies put public relations above public safety.

As consumer advocate Peter Lurie put it recently: "I've seen no shortage of creativity emanating from the marketing departments of drug companies."

The allegations have come to light thanks to lawsuits in the United States and Australia seeking compensation for drug costs that the plaintiffs claim were too high. The suits allege the drug companies skewed academic investigations into their products, thereby driving up the price they could charge.

Trudo Lemmens, an associate professor of medical law at the University of Toronto, says it should not be left to the civil courts to uncover what he calls "publishing as marketing."

"You have to ask yourself, why isn't there more regulatory control?"

Lemmens would like to see tougher conflict-of-interest rules and more oversight of how drug trials are conducted, and the results published.

Obviously more is published online in the full story, on the Star's Healthzone website.

Human eggs for sale

New York State has become the first US state to begin paying women for their eggs for use in stem cell research.

The Empire State Stem Cell Board (ESSCB), which oversees New York's $600 million stem cell research program that was launched last year, came to the decision last week (June 11) following "extensive deliberation" from its ethics committee.

"The Board agreed that it is ethical and appropriate for women donating oocytes for research purposes to be compensated in the same manner as women who donate oocytes for reproductive purposes and for such payments to be reimbursable as an allowable expense" under state taxpayer-backed grants, the ESSCB wrote in a statement.

The board noted that researchers in other states that ban financial reimbursement have mostly failed to recruit women to donate eggs for free.

Ethicists are split

"I don't think it's a good idea," Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Scientist. It's "more ethically acceptable" to pay women to harvest eggs for in vitro fertilization programs because donor eggs have proven successful in assisted fertility treatments. With stem cell research, "the risk benefit ratio starts to slide," Caplan said. "It's a lot iffier a proposition and I think that makes a difference. In research you don't know what you're going to get, and the odds are that cloning for research is never going to work." ...

Ronald M. Green, a bioethicist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, said he's "glad to see" the ESSCB's decision. Green, who serves pro bono on the ethics advisory board of Advanced Cell Technology, a Massachusetts-based biotech company, said that it's ethical and necessary to pay women to donate eggs for stem cell research if researchers want to investigate the potential of therapeutic cloning. "It's discriminatory and sexist not to pay for eggs," Green said, noting that men can be paid for sperm. "It is paternalistic and protective to say that [women] can't make this decision."

But many critics, including Father Thomas Berg, director of the Catholic think tank Westchester Institute for Ethics & the Human Person, argue that compensation will lead to the exploitation of poor and disenfranchised women. Paying women as much as $10,000 -- the upper limit under the ESSCB's directives -- will "create an undue inducement" that will put vulnerable women at risk, he said. "It's precedent setting."

 

Merck troubles mount

Merck & Co., in the middle of $41.1 (US) billion merger talks with Schering-Plough Corp., is facing more troubles as the Food and Drug Administration in the United States demands that warnings of dangerous side effects from its top-selling asthma drug be boosted following growing evidence of problems.

AstraZeneca and Cornerstone Therapeutics are facing similar orders.

After 15 months of investigation, the Food and Drug Administration said Merck & Co. Inc., AstraZeneca and Cornerstone Therapeutics will have to raise label warnings about psychiatric problems reported by a handful of patients taking their drugs.

"Patients and healthcare professionals should be aware of the potential for neuropsychiatric events with these medications," the FDA said in a posting to its Web site.

A spokeswoman for Merck said the language already appears in Singulair's label, but will be raised to the "precautions" section. It's now listed in a section about various side effects reported by patients.

"We've been working with the FDA since Singulair came to market and every time we update the label it's in cooperation with them," said Merck spokeswoman Pamela Eisele. ...

The exact language of the labeling updates has not been released, but the FDA said it could mention a slew of psychiatric problems, including: "agitation, aggression, anxiousness, dream abnormalities and hallucinations, depression, insomnia, irritability, restlessness, suicidal thinking and behavior — including suicide — and tremors."

The move comes just weeks after a former research subinvestigator at Vivra Asthma & Allergy, an asthma research and treatment centre, went public with allegations that its Singular trails were knowingly skewed and falsified.

Trials of Singular, Serevent, Foradil, Flovent, Xolair, Accolate, and Xopenex conducted at the Tucson, Ariz., facility of Vivra Asthma & Allergy were corrupted by protocol violations and outright falsifications, says Robert Davidson, M.D., a former clinical research subinvestigator (SI) at the facility. ...

Davidson charges that during aggressive recruitment schemes in the late 1990s, patients with abnormal EKGs, multiple risk factors for coronary artery disease, arrhythmias, pulmonary embolisms, rheumatic fever histories, acute illnesses, and even pituitary tumors were enrolled with impunity in trials that earned investigators as much as $10,000 per patient.

Patients were “prescreened” for asthma drug trials with medically unnecessary pulmonary function tests (PFTs) without their knowledge or consent and had medication dosages reduced in apparent efforts to qualify them for the lucrative trials.

Staff could be seen entering rooms where placebos and real drugs were mixed and unblended, invalidating entire studies sent to the FDA as data for new drug applications.

The brazen “study buddy” and “crossover” arrangements, as staff referred to them, included churning or serially enrolling patients into clinical trials despite risks to their health and early terminations, coercing unwilling patients to participate, and directly falsifying patient study diaries, say documents filed by Davidson in a federal complaint.

Merck stands by its drug.

"For the millions of people suffering from either asthma or allergic rhinitis, SINGULAIR is an important treatment option for appropriate patients," said Scott Korn, M.D., vice president, Clinical Risk Management and Safety Surveillance, Merck Research Laboratories.

Merck held a conference call with drug reps late Friday to talk about the FDA order, but according to BNET Pharma and CafePharma.com, things didn't go well.

Naturally, Merck management scheduled a conference call for drug reps who tout Singulair at 6p.m. on Friday (an hour guaranteed to please reps hoping for a stress-free weekend). Unfortunately, many reps only received the note scheduling the meeting at 7 p.m. — one hour after the call started. From CafePharma:

I found out about a 6PM teleconference after 7PM. Gotta love management.

Other reps had difficulty navigating Merck’s dial in system:

First, they give vague directions about the teleconference (you had to go on to Comm. Central to get the dial-in number). Then they start 15 min late trying to get their s$%t together. Then TC says that this is a great opportunity to show our customers how committed we are to patients. When is the last time these people were in the field? Completely out of touch. Another Monday am to dread.

Those who did dial-in on time were kept on hold, just as they had been at an earlier conference call at 8 a.m. which apparently only got started at 8.20 a.m.:

This morning the the other S teleconference scheduled for 8 AM starts after 8:20 AM. What is going on inside? Half the country is on hold listening to music. I got work to do guys. I have to move and make calls.

All this comes amid allegations that Merck used fake academic journals and suppressed negative drug trail results.

In a final note, the American Journal of Bioethics blog, blog.bioethics.net, has congratulated this blog on its coverage of Merck and other drug companies of late.

I couldn't be more pleased that [insert gratuitous but sincere praise:] outstanding Toronto Star writer Stuart Laidlaw has been rigorously following the Merck/Elsevier scandal. It's practically flattering that he's listening to bioethics' and in particular bioethics' publishing voices, and he's quoted The American Journal of Bioethics Editor's Blog [that'd be the fancy-pants name for blog.bioethics.net] on his own Toronto Star Medical Ethics blog. However...the old adage that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" may not apply to taking on the admittedly incredible ethical missteps by Merck ... and its publishing mules, comprising a whole fleet of bogus journals made to fool academics and clinicians.

You'd think that Merck would have learned from Vioxx and their New England Journal mistake (oops, forgot to send that data...) where publishing is concerned. You'd think ANY publishing company would learn that presenting the appearance of peer review for sale, then refusing to be transparent about just how much it COSTS to buy a peer reviewed journal. But you'd be wrong.

The thing is ... Stuart ... these guys are not, well, did you see the movie The Insider? [note to pharma lawyers and publishers of all kinds: I live on a small island in the Pacific...really...]

Summer Johnson, PhD

Let's hope she's wrong.

Publishing scandals spark resignation

The editor-in-chief of an online, open source medical journal that was tricked into accepting a nonsensical fake article for publication, in return for an $800 publishing fee, has resigned.

Bambang Parmanto, a University of Pittsburgh information scientist, resigned from his editorship at The Open Information Science Journal(TOISCIJ) after reading a story on The Scientist's website yesterday (June 10) that described a hoax paper submission to the journal. Editors at journal claimed to have peer reviewed the article and slated it for publication pending the submission of $800 in "open access fees."

"I didn't like what happened," Parmanto told The Scientist. "If this is true, I don't have full control of the content that is accepted to this journal." Parmanto said that he had never seen the phony manuscript that was accepted by TOISCIJ. "I want to lessen my exposure to the risk of being taken advantage of."

Parmanto, who became editor-in-chief of TOISCIJ when Bentham launched the journal last year, said that he had reviewed manuscripts for inclusion in the journal previously, but that he made up his mind to resign from his volunteer position "because of the potential for abuse," of the kind uncovered by the hoax. Parmanto did add, however, that the perpetrators of the hoax -- Cornell grad student Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal of Medicine -- were also guilty of some degree of unethical behavior.

"This is a process based on trust," he said. "An author should submit something legitimate, and the process on the review side should decide if a paper is worth publishing or not. In this case, the process was broken on both sides."

A member of a sister publication's editorial advisory board also quit, saying he no longer wanted his name associated with the company.

The fake article was generated by a computer program that strung the words together.

The resignations are the latest twist in a growing scandal that has involved ghostwriters and fake journals sponsored by drug companies to promote their medications -- which turn out later to have serious side effects.

Ghostwriters used by Lily to promote drugs in journals

Eli Lily & Co. employees acted as ghostwriters, preparing favourable scientific papers on the company's top-selling anti-psychotic drug that later appeared in medical journals under the names of real doctors and researchers claiming to have written them.

Later non-ghostwritten articles found the drug, Zyprexa, causes added risk of developing diabetes.

Eli Lilly & Co. officials wrote medical journal studies about the anti-psychotic Zyprexa and then asked doctors to put their names on the articles, a practice called “ghostwriting,” according to unsealed company files.

Lilly employees also compiled a guide to hiring scientists to write favorable articles, complained to journal editors when publication was delayed and submitted rejected articles to other outlets, according to documents filed in drug-overpricing suits against the Indianapolis-based company, the largest manufacturer of psychiatric medicines.

Drugmakers’ use of ghostwriters has created “a huge body of medical literature that society can’t trust,” said Carl Elliott, a University of Minnesota bioethicist who has written about the practice.

Lilly sought to make Zyprexa “the number one selling psychotropic in history,” according to a 2000 plan distributed to its product team. The memo was among more than 10,000 pages of internal documents unsealed last month in lawsuits by insurers and pension funds seeking to recoup money spent on the drug. They allege Lilly exaggerated Zyprexa’s effectiveness.

“Plaintiffs are releasing one-sided, cherry-picked documents obtained in discovery to selected news media in an effort to try their cases” there, said Lilly spokeswoman Marni Lemons. “Lilly remains prepared to defend ourselves against all of these allegations in the appropriate venue, a court of law.”

Lily joins other top drug makers involved in revelations about questionable scientific studies -- and even fake scientific journals -- published as little more than marketing tools for medications that later turned out to have dangerous side effects, including Merck & Co., and Pfizer Inc.

Medical ethicists quoted in the Bloomberg story about Lily said it was akin to plagiarism for doctors and researchers allowing their names to appear on ghostwritten articles. Barton Moffatt, a Mississippi State University bioethicist, called it "academic misconduct" and predicted that as the scandal grows researchers could find themselves fired over the practice.

John Buse, a former president of the American Diabetes Association who was listed as lead author of an article prepared with a Lily staffer in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, said researchers can develop a "stockholm Syndrome" with the drug companies they're are dealing with.

“I’m not saying that the pharmaceutical industry captures me,” Buse said. “But to the extent that the relationship has something above and beyond medicine, science, you know, it could cloud one’s judgement.”

Buse added that many researchers develop emotional attachments to drugs they’ve discovered or studied extensively.

“There’s this natural tendency for people to fall in love with your drug: it’s like your child,” Buse said. “So you have a hard time accepting criticism.”

Also this week, Zyprexa was approved in the U.S. for use by teenagers.

'Nonsense' science article offered publication -- for a fee

Using a bit of mischief, researchers at Cornell University and the New England Journal of Medicine have exposed the dangers of open access scientific journals after they were able to get a nonsensical article past editors of the Open Information Science Journal recently.

All they had to do was submit an $800 (US) "access fee" to the journal, blogger Bob Grant said in his blog for The Scientist magazine.

Philip Davis, a PhD student in scientific communications at Cornell University, and Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal of Medicine, submitted the fake manuscript to The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ) at the end of January. Image:

Davis generated the paper, which was titled "Deconstructing Access Points," using a computer program -- called SCIgen -- created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and Anderson signed the work using pseudonyms (David Phillips and Andrew Kent). The two listed the "Center for Research in Applied Phrenology" (CRAP) as their home institution on the paper, which featured fictitious tables, figures and references.

"I wanted to really see whether this article would be peer reviewed," said Davis. "[Our paper] has the look of an article, but it makes no sense."

Davis told The Scientist that he got the idea for this "little experiment" after receiving scores of spam emails soliciting article submissions and invitations to serve on editorial boards of open access journals from Bentham Science Publishers, TOISCIJ's publisher. According to its website, Bentham publishes "200 plus open access journals" that cover disciplines from bioinformatics and pharmacology to engineering and neuroscience. "One of the things that made Bentham catch our eye," Anderson said, "was that they were so aggressively soliciting manuscripts."

The two wrote about the incident today on the Scholarly Kitchen, the Society for Scholarly Publishing blog that they run.

The journal claimed the article had been peer-reviewed -- standard practice for scholarly journals -- but the two researchers received no review notes on their article. They were tempted to pay the $800 to see if their article would actually be published, but decided that would be unethical.

Grant tried to get the journal's side of the story, but was not successful.

I called Richard Morrissy, who's listed as the US contact for Bentham Science Publishers on the company's website, but he declined to answer my questions and instead directed me to his supervisor, Matthew Honan, who works in Bentham's France office. Honan does not have a phone number, according to Morrissy, and he did not reply to an email (which was CC'ed to Bentham's marketing team in Pakistan) by the time this article was posted.

Despite the obvious humour here, the incident also points to potential dangers, especially as one of the world's leading pahrma companies Merck & Co. finds itself in a fake publishing scandal of its own.

Open access journals generally charge authors fees to publish research papers. For example, BioMed Central journals charge up to $2265 in "article processing fees," and publishing in the PloS family of journals costs authors between $1300 - $2850. With institutional libraries, including Cornell's, and granting institutions, such as the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, offering to pay open access publication fees for faculty authors and grantees, the potential for abuse may be increasing. "It's almost an inevitability that you might have several publishers tempted to take advantage of this relatively easy money," said Anderson.

By the way, here's an excerpt from the opening of the article in question:

"Compact symmetries and compilers have garnered tremendous interest from both futurists and biologists in the last several years. The flaw of this type of solution, however, is that DHTs can be made empathic, large-scale, and extensible. Along these same lines, the drawback of this type of approach, however, is that active networks and SMPs can agree to fix this riddle."

 

More trouble for Merck

Already embroiled in a scandal over fake scientific journals it funded to promote its products, pharma giant Merck & Co. is now the subject of a law suit alleging that it misled customers into charging too much for prescriptions of cholesterol pills.

Also named in the suit over medications Zetia and Vytorin was Schering-Plough Corp., which Merck bought in March.

The companies have known for years -- and failed to make public -- that Zetia doesn’t reduce fatty arterial plaques that can cause heart attacks and strokes, according to the complaint filed June 5 in Philadelphia federal court. The suit, brought by the Pennsylvania Employees Benefit Trust Fund, seeks to recoup more than $9 million spent on the two drugs since October 2002. 

“Merck and Schering-Plough entered into, and through various overt acts implemented, an agreement between themselves to illegally promote Vytorin and Zetia,” lawyers for the fund said in the complaint.

Sales of Zetia and Vytorin fell 12 percent last year to $4.5 billion after two studies showed the pills may work no better at unclogging arteries than does an older, cheaper medicine called simvastatin. Vytorin combines Zetia and Merck’s simvastatin, a statin-class drug the Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based company markets as Zocor.

Merck and Schering-Plough developed Vytorin to help further the profitable life of Zocor, which lost its patent protection in June 2006, according to the complaint. Generic Zocor alone costs 3 cents a pill compared to about $3 a pill for Vytorin, the complaint said.

“We believe the companies acted responsibly and appropriately and we intend to defend this lawsuit vigorously,” Ron Rogers, a spokesman for Merck, said today in a phone interview.

Schering-Plough spokesman Lee Davies said that company hasn’t yet been served with a copy of the complaint but plans to defend itself.

“Vytorin and Zetia have been shown to reduce LDL- cholesterol based on numerous clinical studies, and they have been approved by the FDA for that indication,” Davies said in an e-mailed statement.

The companies allegedly “suppressed” the results of a January 2008 study called Enhance that showed the drugs worked no better at clearing arteries than the generic drug simvastatin, according to the complaint. The companies also used false and deceptive marketing techniques claiming Vytorin was more efficacious than and just as safe as the much cheaper generic, the complaint said.

Meanwhile, according to Forbes magazine, Merck is facing "new questions about the company's drug development prowess" after its hoped-for next big heart drug rolofylline came back with disappointing results from clinical trials.

Merck publishing scandal widens

Pharmaceuticals giant Merck & Co. is refusing to answer questions about a growing scandal involving its publication of fake scientific journals that were, in fact, little more than promotions for its products.

Originally thought to have published six such journals, it now turns out Merck bought and paid for nine journals -- with 13 more in the works.

News of the fake journals broke in April in The Scientist when it reported that Merck had paid Australian publisher Elsevier to print Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (AJBJM), without revealing that the publication was created and paid for by Merck.

The "vast majority"of articles in AJBJM during its 2002 to 2005 publishing life were favourable articles about Merck drugs Fosamax and Vioxx -- two medications that have been linked to dangerous side effects.

Fosamax is an osteoporosis drug that has been linked to cancer.

LegalView reports on the recent Fosamax side effects, which have caused patients to not only consider new medications but to discuss the potential for a Fosamax class action lawsuit as well. In January, two medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Dental Association provided a one-two punch against the drug’s manufacturers, Merck and Co., reportedly linking the drug to such side effects as esophageal cancer and jaw bone die-off. Patients of the osteoporosis drug are advised to contact a medical professional to discuss the drug and its alleged dangers.

Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory, was pulled off the market after independent studies found a link to increased heart attack and strokes.

Merck, in what Summer Johnson calls "passing the buck" in the respected blog.bioethics.net, is refusing to answer questions about the publishing scandal, referring all questions to Elsevier -- which says it is reviewing its policies and admits the publications never should have been called journals.

Johnson is having none it:

Simply because Elsevier took the bait doesn't mean Merck is off the hook. Elsevier is rightfully taking the heat for agreeing to create entire divisions of publications that an Elsevier spokesperson admitted "should not have been called 'journals'." What an admission! What to call a publication such as these really is the question--perhaps they will fade into oblivion such that we will not have to give them a name. Not a chance. ...

If Elsevier really wants to put this scandal behind them, they must throw the doors open wide and disclose everything--including how much they were paid. Eventually the facts will come out. When they do--and I'm only guessing the figure is astronomical--Elsevier will look like they were hiding some very dirty laundry. Merck already is passing the buck and leave Elsevier holding the bag. Thus far it looks like they are succeeding. 

The nine fake journals are: The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, the Australasian Journal of Neurology, the Australasian Journal of Hospital Medicine, the Australasian Journal of General Practice, the Australasian Journal of Cardiology, the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy, the Australasian Journal of Clinical Practice, and the Australasian Journal of Musculoskeletal Medicine. 

The 13 planned fakes are: The Australasian Journal of Pediatrics, the Australasian Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Australasian Journal of Dentistry, the Australasian Journal of Infectious Diseases, the Australasian Journal of Pain Management, the Australasian Journal of Respiratory Medicine, the Australasian Journal of Sexual Health, the Australasian Journal of Psychiatry, the Australasian Journal of Asthma, the Australasian Journal of Gastroenterology, the Australasian Journal of Hospital Pharmacy, the Australasian Journal of Depression, the Core Journals in Oncology. 

 

The ultimate silk purse

Researchers in China claim to have figured out a way to coax cells from any part of a pig's body -- they used cells from a pig's ear and bone marrow -- into any type of cell in the body, just like embryonic stem cells.

The breakthough could set the stage for pigs being raised to grow organs for humans for transplantation, the researchers say.

Lead researcher Dr Lei Xiao, of the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, said many other attempts had been made to transform adult cells from animals such as pigs into "pluripotent" stem cells, but they had failed.

He said: "Therefore, it is entirely new, very important and has a number of applications for both human and animal health."

Dr Xiao's team reprogrammed cells taken from a pig's ear and bone marrow, using a cocktail of chemicals introduced into the cells via a virus.

Tests showed that the reprogrammed cells were capable of becoming any of the cell types that make up the three layers in a developing embryo.

Dr Xiao said pigs were a potentially ideal source of organs for transplant, as their organs were similar in function and size to those found in humans.

In its blog,the American Journal of Bioethcis quipped that the breakthrough could help save the pig's reputation after the swine flu scare.

Medical researchers have long looked to pigs as a potential source of human organs in a field known as xenotransplantation, saying it could help with chronic shortages of organs from transplant.

Professor Chris Mason, an expert in regenerative medicine at University College London, said: "This breakthrough to produce pig stem cells potentially reinvigorates the quest to grow humanised pig organs such as pancreases for diabetics and kidneys for chronic renal failure.

"The clinical use of humanised porcine tissues and organs (xenografts) has moved a long way forward in recent months with successful small-scale clinical trials.

There's a certain "yuck" factor for many people, however, and animal rights activists and religious groups have objected to the idea.

Dr Sebastien Farnaud, science director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, said: "Persisting with highly speculative research that would see us use sentient animals as little more that living organ grow-bags, is not only ethically unsupportable but also scientifically dubious.

"Creating pig stem cells does not necessarily remove the risk of organ rejection but even more worrying is the risk of infecting patients and the wider public with pig viruses."