Unpublished Macchiarini manuscript confirms 5 forgotten trachea transplant patients

7.09.2017 This article was slapped with an injunction by Berlin court (here), on behalf of Jungebluth. Sentences forbidden by injunction are replaced to show the legal truth.

I have been forwarded a manuscript by the scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, which was originally intended to present in detail all of his known 9 cadaveric trachea recipients (only 4 are recorded officially). The compilation follows exactly all the patients who are already listed on my site, with the small difference that the paper (allegedly rejected at Nature Communications) presents their clinical evolutions quite differently from reality. One of these now fully confirmed victims of Macchiarini’s research was his second patient from Barcelona, whom Macchiarini transplanted in secret; five were operated in Italy (including Keziah Shorten and the Czech patient MK). The manuscript also confirms that Macchiarini’s acolyte Philipp Jungebluth [is an angel of innocence and never did anything bad in his life. Every patient ever treated by him is in fact eternally grateful]. The German doctor is currently suing me in court for alleged libel, insisting that all these patient deaths and his proven research misconduct in Sweden would never ever disqualify him from developing trachea transplants and training as thorax surgeon at the University Clinic Heidelberg, where he however doesn’t work anymore.

The first author of this lost and now found unpublished paper is Johannes Haag, Macchiarini’s other acolyte and former MD student from Hannover Medical School (MHH) in Germany. Haag is apparently still employed at the Thoraxklinik at the University of Heidelberg, where Jungebluth used to be. The manuscript, which was supposed to be Haag’s big paper, was written to deal with the fact that too many of Macchiarini’s cadaveric trachea recipients died or developed very severe complications. To this end, the team hatched an idea to do “reverse translational experiments“, where rat experiments would follow those on 9 humans, prove that the cadaveric trachea technology works in principle and it was the human patients who were making problems. This notion was to be supported also by their earlier pig study Go et al, Biomaterials 2010, where Macchiarini and Jungebluth claim, without a shred of evidence, that the large animal testing was performed before the first patient, Claudia Castillo, received a cadaveric trachea in 2008 (details here, here and here). Update 7.09.2017: Go et al 2010 paper was criticised on PubPeer for its heavy scientific and technical deficits.

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Macchiarini’s trachea transplant patients: the full list

This article lists all known (including those not officially declared) patients of the scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who received from him a cadaveric or plastic trachea. All these grafts were “regenerated” with bone marrow and epithelial cells, in some cases a bioreactor was used to incubate cells on the trachea carcass, in some cases a “bionic” method was applied, where cells were brought straight into the open patient, together with growth factors like EPO. Not all patients are named in my list, though names of all are available, certainly at the hospitals where they were treated. One of my sources is a patients list from the Careggi Hospital in Florence, Italy, which the Corriere Fiorentino journalist Alessio Gaggioli sent me. Some of the patients I already described in an earlier article.

This now is a full list, and it will be updated whenever I receive any new evidence. All Macchiarini trachea transplant patients are listed in the chronological order of their operation. The 2003 operated patient (story here), who received from Macchiarini (together with Heike and Thorsten Walles) a small “regenerated” tracheal patch of pig intestine, is not included here, as it was not a trachea transplant as such. There is a total of 17 patients, at least 11 are dead, the rest, if alive, were left mutilated.

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Keziah’s deadly trachea transplant: UCL hospital’s secret

Keziah Shorten was a 19-year old teenager from England and officially Paolo Macchiarini 3rd patient receiving a cadaveric trachea transplant. She suffered from a slow growing form of cancer and received a cadaveric trachea transplant from Macchiarini at the Careggi hospital in Florence. After life-threatening complications ensued, her second transplant, a plastic trachea made and implanted at UCL and its UCL hospital (UCLH) in London, failed also. Keziah died one and a half years after her first operation. With new evidence provided to me by a source close to the patient, I present here a version of Keziah’s story which is very much different from the official one. This makes UCL and UCLH at least in part responsible for her death, from the very beginning. It was their decision to treat Keziah with the first cadaveric transplant, which sealed her fate. Next to the UCL honorary professor Macchiarini himself, the British doctors, who according to my source promised Keziah a complete cure and initiated this transplant, were UCL professors and surgeons Martin Birchall and Paul O’Flynn. Keziah was even supposed to be operated at UCLH, but once Macchiarini got an ethics permit in Italy, she was moved there. O’Flynn followed her and joined Macchiarini in the transplant operation. Afterwards, it was an ongoing catastrophe which was exacerbated by an apparent botched intervention at UCL Hospital. Death seemed a relief after terrible suffering imposed on Keziah by fame-seeking doctors worshipping their own magic of regenerative medicine. Continue reading “Keziah’s deadly trachea transplant: UCL hospital’s secret” →

The vexatious life-saving question of cadaveric tracheas

As we learned it from the Swedish documentary „Experimenten“, the scandal trachea surgeon Paolo Macchiarini didn’t much like to operate on sick cancer patients: they died too quickly after receiving a trachea transplant. This is why Macchiarini was said to have moved on to patients outside of any life-threatening conditions, like the Russian car accident victim Yulia Tuulik. She died because of the plastic trachea which Macchiarini implanted into her. Yesim Cetir, young victim of a botched operation, was slightly luckier to survive the plastic trachea, but only because it was removed and because of constant emergency care and multiple organ transplants (she is presently in very grave state). However, it seems that even Macchiarini’s cancer patients could have led a relatively long life, had they not agreed to receive his trachea transplants. And I am not speaking about the lethal plastic ones. In fact, the “biological” grafts made of decellurised dead donor tracheas were not such a great success either, and seem to have brought suffering and have shortened lives instead of prolonging them. The British UCL and its hospital UCLH are preparing their own clinical trial with cadaveric tracheas, while busily covering up their role in the Macchiarini scandal.

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Collapse of Biotrachea, or how Macchiarini’s greed saved human lives

The trachea transplant experiments by Paolo Macchiarini left many of his trusting patients dead or mutilated. His €5.5 Million EU-funded research project Biotrachea started in April 2012 and was specifically designed to treat even more human beings with lethal plastic tracheas (and with the slightly less lethal cadaveric ones). The consortium was terminated in 2014 (see some background here), but not because the Biotrachea scientists or EU officials suddenly had second thoughts when the Macchiarini scandal unraveled and when his misconduct, ethics breaches as well as painful deaths and suffering of his plastic trachea recipients became known. Unlike an EU spokesperson previously insisted, there were no ethics concerns at all regarding Biotrachea. In fact, all ethics approvals were in place, human Guinea pigs were supposed to be lured en masse using a highly inappropriate patient consent form towards their likely deaths for the sake of EU-funded mega-science.

In truth, Biotrachea collapsed only because of Macchiarini’s greed for money. His financial conflict about patent revenues with the British university UCL drove the star surgeon to seek another plastic transplant manufacturer and then to destroy the entire multinational research consortium which he was presiding over, after the EU rejected his new plastic provider. Not because that one was also deemed unsafe, but as the EU negotiators mentioned, it was because that new type of plastic trachea lacked novelty. All this only became known after the original Biotrachea documents, which the EU and all consortium participants refused to grant me any insight into, were fully legally obtained by Jonas Malmstedt under Swedish transparency from Macchiarini’s ex-employer, the Karolinska Institutet (KI). Thanks to this brave and decent surgeon, I make all that secret documentation available below.

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The newly found innocence of Paolo Macchiarini

The tide is turning for the fallen star surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who transplanted numerous patients with lethal tracheas made out of dead donor organs or plastic and sprinkled with cells from the bone marrow. Just when Macchiarini started to became the synonym for everything what is bad and evil in regenerative medicine, after two damning investigations by his former employers Karolinska Institutet (KI) and the Karolinska University Hospital, things began to change for the better.

In a surprising decision, the Italian court in Florence cleared the former head surgeon of Careggi Hospital of all accusations of fraud (Macchiarini was accused of extortion, namely of huge sums from patient families while offering to save the terminally ill). This court decision prompted the Tuscan governor Enrico Rossi to immediately lament the loss of a “great surgeon”, who would have done so much good if he only remained in Florence, under proper control. Back in 2010, this politician’s exalting letter of recommendation helped Macchiarini to get the KI professorship despite the many negative references from his medical colleagues.

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Frontiers’ Bread Madness

The journal Frontiers in Human Neurosciences now published a paper titled: “Bread and Other Edible Agents of Mental Disease“. It is authored by two psychologists, Paola Bressan and Peter Kramer from the Department of General Psychology at University of Padova in Italy, and claims “in non-technical, plain English” that mental diseases such as schizophrenia and autism are caused by bread (yes, you read right, bread). In their “review article” Bressan and Kramer claim to provide evidence that bread gluten makes “holes in our gut”, thus activating an immune response, and is degraded into opioid substances (“some of them resemble morphine extremely much”). The casein in milk has allegedly exactly the same effect, and cure for “schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and autism” is possible by adhering to a strict bread- and milk-free diet. In fact, other staple foods might make you mad as well, as authors conclude:

“Bread is the very symbol of food, and learning that it can threaten our mental wellbeing may come as a shock to many. Yet bread is not alone; like it, other foodstuffs, such as milk, rice, and corn, release exorphins during digestion”.

Though the paper appeared on March 29th, it was meant seriously and not as an April 1st joke. Continue reading “Frontiers’ Bread Madness” →

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Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine

Tag: Italy