Four convictions asked in Stamina trial

(ANSA) - Turin, March 30 - Italian prosecutors on Thursday asked for four convictions for Brescia hospital staff in a trial into the discredited Stamina stem-cell treatment. Prosecutors asked for three years for Ermanna Derelli, former health director, and Carmen Terraroli, secretary of the ethics committee; and two years nine months for Arnalda Lanfranchi, the had of a lab, and for paediatrician Fulvio Porta. In October 2015 a Turin judge ruled that the statute of limitations had been exceeded in the fraud case against Davide Vannoni, president of the Stamina Foundation, who was accused of trying to defraud the northern Piedmont regional health agency of 500,000 euros with his project. In June 2015, a Turin judge called the Stamina stem cell treatment, invented by Vannoni and now banned in Italy, "an enormous scientific fraud", and Italy's supreme Cassation Court said the Stamina treatment "has no scientific validity".