By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
What with the EU phase 2 clinical trial TETRA going nowhere, the technology’s owner, Liverpool-based company Videregen decided to seek new clinical partners. Surgeons and universities from outside the EU are invited to test Videregen’s trachea transplant technology, which was originally developed together with Paolo Macchiarini by the UCL laryngologist and paid Videregen advisor Martin Birchall.
Imagine you are Martin Birchall, laryngologist and ENT surgeon, star of regenerative medicine at UCL and trachea transplant enthusiast. You and your business partner Videregen need to explain to EU bureaucrats why your technology of decellurised cadaveric trachea is perfectly safe, what with all the dead patients of yours and your former best friend Paolo Macchiarini. Yet both your trachea transplant pigs die. EU authorities however accept this as proof that your method is safe!
The European Commission admitted that their €6.8 mn phase 2 clinical trial TETRA with cadaveric tracheas, led by the UCL laryngologist Martin Birchall is unlikely to ever recruit any patients. In January 2019, the status was changed to “grant agreement terminated”
The European Union Commission staunchly refuses to tell me what exactly their funded scientists intend to do to the scheduledContinue Reading
The Science and Technology Committee of the British House of Commons is now dealing with the trachea transplants performed byContinue Reading
The esteemed London university UCL seems to live in its own world. There, the regenerative medicine magic thrives, living organsContinue Reading
With his three trachea transplant clinical trials suspended, the British laryngologist and UCL professor Martin Birchall now tries to pull at leastContinue Reading
Here I republish the written evidence submitted to by two UK scientists to the Science and Technology Committee of the BritishContinue Reading
The British laryngologist and UCL professor Martin Birchall is one of the two founding fathers of “bioengineered” trachea, the other one beingContinue Reading
UCL has completed the investigation into the affair around their past honorary professor Paolo Macchiarini and the trachea transplants. The report avoids implicating Macchiarini’s partner Martin Birchall. The only guilty party is the nuclear physicist Alexander Seifalian.
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