More inconsistencies arise in publications and statements of the litigation-happy professors of the University of Würzburg, Heike and Thorsten Walles. These regenerative medicine scientists turned the entire might of German justice system against my reporting, while their academic employer remains shamefully silent.  Their elusive animal experiments with the pig intestine-based tracheal transplants seem to be very real when Heike Walles speaks about them and become non-existent when her husband and research partner Thorsten does. While the University of Würzburg and the federal watchdog Paul-Ehrlich-Institute (PEI) protect the surgeon by asserting that no ethics vote was needed to perform his tracheal transplants on 3 patients, his wife claimed that he actually needed and obtained an ethics approval to do this.  Thorsten Walles himself in fact indicated that his last transplant in 2009 might have broken the German Tissue Law from 2007, i.e., if he indeed failed to obtain an ethics vote, while operating under compassionate use. In any case, no German institution was willing to discuss with me the existence or non-existence of these ethics approvals. Despite the simple fact that none of these 3 patients is alive today (one died in fact very soon after operation), it is none of public’s business.

Now, a seemingly duplicated image was spotted in two Walles publications (Linke et al 2007 and Schanz et al 2010). They describe the creation of an “artificial liver”, made from decellurised pig intestine (just like the tracheal transplants), seeded with endothelial and liver cells. These two publications are 3 years apart, the methodology description is also slightly different (e.g., decellurisation process and the speed and kind of perfusion). A minor aspect may be that the Linke et al 2007 paper described the use of pig cellular material, and Schanz et al 2010 employed primary human cells from patient biopsies. Finally, the image seems not just duplicated, but one looks actually brighter and like a zoom-in of the other.

Continue reading “Image duplication and other irregularities of Heike and Thorsten Walles” →

The Würzburg regenerative medicine researchers Heike and Thorsten Walles, joined by their colleague Jan Hansmann, are now hitting back at the evidence I presented, which all clearly suggests that no animal testing was performed on their tracheal transplants made of pig intestine before those were tested on 3 patients, coincidently none of whom is alive today. The first test was performed in 2003 at the Hannover Medical School (MHH) in Germany, and led by none other than the scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, Walleses’ former superior. Two more tests were performed on two patients in Stuttgart, where Walleses moved to in 2004 (see details here). About the last tracheal transplant in 2009, an analysis of Thorsten Walles’ own words raise new questions about its legality in regard to German Tissue Law from 2007.  The University Clinic Würzburg shamefully continues to refuse to share any information with me, despite the protests of many international scientists. In fact, it even refuses to say if Walleses were given persmission to use their institutional affiliation to achieve that court injunction against me. Continue reading “Evidence is a lie, listen to our authority, say Walles to scientists” →

The tracheal transplant experiments on three human patients were performed by the German scientists Heike and Throsten Walles without any previous animal testing, as now admitted to me by the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (Fraunhofer IGB) in Stuttgart.  It also came to light that the pig intestine-based tracheal transplant was eventually deemed as too toxic, and a follow-up animal testing was apparently cancelled. Heike Walles is still associated with Fraunhofer IGB while being together with her husband employed as professors at the University Clinic of Würzburg. A patient of theirs received in 2007 a tracheal transplant of unknown size and shape, prepared from decellurised and in vitro re-populated pig intestine; this unnamed person died only some weeks after, of causes unknown to us. We know however, that two weeks before that operation, a tubular tracheal graft made from pig intestine was test-implanted into the patient’s arm for a week. After a quick analysis, a second in parallel prepared graft was implanted into the patient’s airways. Remarkably, only preliminary first in-arm test, but not the main operation, was ever published (Mertsching et al 2009), around two years after the patient’s death. The next patient, an Indian immigrant Pavninder Singh, received a large tracheal patch, which apparently did not perform as expected: the patient’s tracheostomy had to be re-opened, there was also apparently heavy inflammation. That patient committed suicide 2.5 years after the operation, and became in 2013 a central character of a book chapter which described his and the scientists Walles’ story (Bernhard Albrecht, “Patient of My Life”). Only in 2015 was the case of that patient published as a research paper (Steinke et al, 2015), his tracheostomy went for some reason unmentioned, just like the fact that Singh was no longer alive since 2011. All these tracheal transplants were prepared in the lab of Heike Walles (back then under her former husband’s name Mertsching) at Fraunhofer IGB, the transplantations took place at the neighbouring  Robert Bosch Hospital, Clinic Schillerhöhe,  where Thorsten Walles used to work as surgeon, before becoming professor in Würzburg. The details can be read in this article. Continue reading “No animal testing before Walles tracheal transplants, admits Fraunhofer Society” →