The widow of the scientist who studied Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in a laboratory in Bellvitge, and who died in 2022 at the age of 45 after manifesting symptoms compatible with the disease he was researching, filed a civil protection claim for the right to honor against the director of the laboratory, the neuropathologist Isidre Ferrer.
Fellow scientist Ana Villar, who worked on the team of her husband, Franc Llorens, decided to hire a lawyer and go to court after professor Isidre Ferrer discovered thousands of unauthorized samples in a freezer in laboratory 4141, when the scientist he began to feel unwell and requested discharge.
The widow, who married Llorens after he was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease at the Clínic Hospital in Barcelona, ??considered that Ferrer had attempted against her husband’s honor. The director of the laboratory had held Llorens responsible for endangering the safety of the rest of the staff who worked in that space of the Institut d’Investigació Biomèdica de Bellvitge (Idibell), located on the premises of the University of Barcelona (UB ).
At the beginning of 2021, Ana Villar sent letters threatening legal action against Isidre Ferrer, another person who worked at the laboratory, and the management of Idibell. A year and a half later, in the summer of 2022, he only filed a complaint against Isidre Ferrer. He accuses him of disrespecting Franc Llorens for disclosing that he had a disease caused by prions. No date has yet been set for the trial.
Ferrer informed the management of Idibell and the UB about the situation when he discovered potentially contagious unregistered biological samples in a freezer in the laboratory where Llorens worked. However, neither Idibell nor the UB requested that an autopsy be performed on the neuroscientist, which would have allowed the diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob to be definitively confirmed. The body was cremated at the express wish of his widow, who refused to authorize an autopsy.
Aside from the lawsuit filed by the widow against Ferrer, the Mossos d’Esquadra are already investigating to try to take a first photograph of what happened in that laboratory. A snapshot of the events known up to the moment that allows them to determine whether or not there was any crime in the actions of Franc Llorens, his team, the laboratory or those responsible. A crime against health and safety at work that, in this case, would have had Llorens himself as the main victim.
The police officers of the central consumer unit of the criminal investigation division are in charge of carrying out these first inquiries so that in the coming days they can agree with their superiors to send a first report to the court, whether the case will be prosecuted in a court of law or whether it will continue working by trade
It will not be easy to determine whether the scientist entrusted himself by manipulating prions in a laboratory without the biomedical safety required to work with these potentially infectious proteins. It will not be easy because of the nature of the disease itself, but also because at the time an autopsy was not performed. If it had been authorized, it could have been done in the so-called Ebola room of the Institut de Medicina Legal de Catalunya, authorized precisely for these high-risk clinical autopsies.
