By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
In this 3rd instalment of her Celixir investigation, Patricia Murray learns whose side the British authority MHRA is on. Not the patients’, and certainly not on the side of facts.
Liverpool professor Patricia Murray continues investigating shady dealings of the regmed company Celixir, owned by struck-off dentist Ajan Reginald and Nobelist Sir Martin Evans
Patricia Murray uncovers the business secrets of the Nobelist Martin Evans and his partner Ajan Reginald. It seems the magic iMP cells used to treat patients in Greece were drawn from the blood of patients in Swansea, for the purpose of a secret PhD thesis. There is no serious science behind it, only serious investor money and a fraudulent patent.
Sir Martin Evans, winner of Nobel prize 2007, founded in 2009 the stem cell start-up Celixir, together with a struck-off dentist Ajan Reginald. With the help of the British heart surgeon Stephen Westaby, they ran a very profitable clinical trial in Greece, which now moved into UK.
The 2008 Lancet paper of Paolo Macchiarini and Martin Birchall about the world first trachea transplant might end up retracted. Until recently, the journal’s editor Richard Horton used to ignore and suppress “non peer-reviewed” evidence, but due to combined pressure of activism, media and politics, things started to move.
Videregen, the Liverpool-based company which bought the trachea regeneration patent from UCL, deployed lawyers against the academics Patricia Murray and Raphael Levy, precisely via their employer University of Liverpool. Main issue is the parliamentary submission by Levy and Murray, subject to absolute privilege. Yet Videregen also cites from the confidential notice of suspected research misconduct Murray and Levy submitted in good faith to UCL.
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 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
Here I republish the written evidence submitted to by two UK scientists to the Science and Technology Committee of the BritishContinue Reading
For Better Science