Experimental Surgeon Convicted for Tracheal Implant Death
A Swedish court has convicted Paolo Macchiarini, a formerly lauded trachea surgeon, of causing bodily harm to a patient through negligence during a highly experimental stem-cell trachea transplant. For this, the court handed down a two-year probational sentence. He was acquitted of assault charges on two other patients; all three died in the months and years after the surgeries.
In 2010, Macchiarini was hired by the Karolinska Institute (KI) and the Karolinska University Hospital to support Sweden’s regenerative medicine innovation. His specialty was replacing damaged tracheae with artificial ones that combined stem cells with polymer scaffolds or decellularised donor tracheae. Starting in 2011, he began operating on patients as an experimental life-saving measure but his work at at KI was suspended in 2013 after the second of his three patients died. However, he continued performing surgeries in Russia.
Yet there were already hints that something was amiss even before the first surgeries. In 2011, another academic, Pierre Delaere of UZ Leuven in Belgium accused Macchiarini of misrepresenting research findings in published articles. In 2012, Macchiarini was arrested in Italy and charged with fraud and attempted extortion.
By 2014, after the death of his first patient, three separate allegations were raised of scientific misconduct in reporting the cases. He would later be cleared of these, but in 2016 a TV documentary called ‘The Experiment’ described the suffering and deaths patients of failed artificial tracheas transplants, and raised many issues concerning care and research ethics. The severe public backlash caused KI to launch another investigation into Macchiarini, amid an upheaval which saw a string of resignations and an overhaul of hiring and ethics. He was found to have falsified his CV, and published papers with false or misleading data that were subsequently retracted. By March, he had been fired and criminal charges filed against him.
BBC News reported that at least seven people had died following the surgeries. In 2018, KI found seven researchers guilty of academic misconduct. Swedish authorities decided to reopen investigations into the three deaths.
Matthias Corbascio, a cardiac surgeon at KI who testified in the trial, told SVT Nyheter that he doesn’t believe justice has been done. “My reaction is that it is very meager. It is a terrible scandal and terrible for the patients’ families that he could get away so easily,” he said.
Chief judge Bjoern Skaensberg said the court had agreed with prosecutors that the surgery had not been consistent with “science and proven experience”. However, he told public broadcaster SVT that it had concluded that “two of the interventions were justifiable, but not the third”.
The court had found that all three patients had suffered serious bodily injury, Judge Skaensberg said. But Macchiarini was cleared of assault as no intent to harm had been proven.
Macchiarini had always denied any wrongdoing, arguing that the transplants were aimed at saving the patients’ lives.
However, whistleblower Dr Matthias Corbascio told SVT that the verdict was a scandal and there had never been any chance of the operations succeeding.
The suspended sentence means he will be on probation for the next two years.
Source: BBC News
