Tag: stem cells

Macchiarini’s trachea transplant patients: the full list

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 his a cadaveric or plastic trachea. All received grafts “regenerated” with bone marrow and epithelial cells, in some cases bioreactor was used to incubate cells on the trachea carcass, in some cases a “bionic” method was applied,  where cells were brought straight into 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’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” →

Ciaran’s success story

Ciaran’s success story

Trachea is a very difficult organ to transplant, because its blood supply happens through many tiny blood vessels and it is practically impossible to connect them all (same is true also for the oesophagus). An organ transplanted without blood supply will die, and this is where the regenerative medicine of Paolo Macchiarini and Martin Birchall comes in: a treatment with stem cells and growth factors will somehow magically ensure quick vascularization and bring the dead tissue to life. There is no independent evidence for this, and most patients died as the consequence or became dangerously ill when their new tracheas, made from plastic or from dead, decellurised cadaveric organs predictably failed.  One boy has survived: Ciaran Lynch. His current clinical state is not too rosy, even by Birchall’s own admittance, but nevertheless the sole fact that Ciaran (unlike almost all other trachea transplant patients) is alive, sufficed for Birchall to have one or two more patients operated (both dead) and to push through a clinical trial in UK with a much larger follow-up trial EU-wide. The difference though: that boy never had much choice anyway, since he had no real trachea in the first place. He received very early on a pickled trachea homograft from dead human donor tissue which functioned very well for many years, but at some point urgently needed replacement in order to save his life. Now Birchall however wishes to remove the live airways of stable patients outside any life danger, who suffer from tracheal stenosis, and replace them with his regenerated dead ones (see this report). Noone seems to wonder why these tracheas are to be prepared in a radically different way from that of the sole success, Ciaran Lynch: Birchall’s bioreactor vs so-called “bionic” method of Macchiarini.

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Sumitran-Holgersson and Olausson guilty of misconduct and unethical experiments on children

Sumitran-Holgersson and Olausson guilty of misconduct and unethical experiments on children

Game over apparently near for the indestructible Swedish regenerative medicine researcher Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson, after investigations at her University of Gothenburg  draw to an end. It is about experimental transplants of decellurised veins “regenerated” with the patient’s own bone marrow cells into three child patients, all of whom ended up in life-long medical care, one patient received  a liver transplant after her graft failed, another child suffered severe complications (see this earlier report about an external investigation by Bengt Gerdin into that matter). The University of Gothenburg then established an investigative committee, which followed up on the Gerdin report and specific concerns voiced by a journal editor and a colleague. I publish below the two decisions which revealed that Sumitran-Holgersson and her surgeon partner Michael Olausson never performed any animal testing before recruiting their human patients, they also failed to obtain ethics permits for these operations. Instead the two lied in their publications (Olausson et al, Lancet, 2012; Olausson et al EBioMedicine, 2014) about having obtained ethics votes (something I already uncovered before). During the investigation, Olausson and Sumitran-Holgersson were caught submitting false information to the committee. They were now found guilty of misconduct and ethics breach in both these publications. Continue reading “Sumitran-Holgersson and Olausson guilty of misconduct and unethical experiments on children” →

Retraction, and another looming misconduct finding for Macchiarini and Jungebluth

Retraction, and another looming misconduct finding for Macchiarini and Jungebluth

The misconduct-tainted paper on oesophagus transplants in rats (Sjöqvist et al 2014) by the fallen star of regenerative medicine Paolo Macchiarini is finally retracted by the journal Nature Communications. This happens after Swedish investigations found the authors (primarily the scandal thorax surgeon and his right-hand man Philipp Jungebluth) guilty of data manipulation and research misconduct in September 2016 and after the Karolinska Institutet (KI) shortly before Christmas publicly demanded a retraction (see my report here). Today’s retraction is a major setback for Macchiarini, since his current employment and funding at the Federal University of Kazan (KFU) in Russia depend on his experiments with oesophageal transplants in primates (see my reports here and here). That Russian project was in turn only possible because of Macchiarini’s allegedly successful experiments in rats, published in a prestige journal with “Nature” in its title. This paper’s retraction is therefore probably only the beginning of a whole looming avalanche of bad news for Macchiarini and his acolyte Jungebluth (who currently sues me in court). An expert review of their publication Jungebluth et al 2015 declares the findings of misconduct, ethics breach and patient abuse. The report however has yet to be confirmed by a commission at the Swedish Central Ethics Review Board (CEPN) and then formulated as an official decree by the KI. I publish the expert reviewer report below. Continue reading “Retraction, and another looming misconduct finding for Macchiarini and Jungebluth” →

My Walles trachea transplant reporting fails peer review

My Walles trachea transplant reporting fails peer review

My attempt recently to inform the readers of the journal Tissue Engineering Part A about grave omissions and factual inconsistencies in the Steinke et al 2015 publication by Heike and Thorsten Walles failed spectacularly. Not because the concerns I raised about their tracheal transplants where deemed is irrelevant, far from it. It was the messenger who was seen as disreputable. The editor chose to send my letter out for peer review, despite the fact that I was never addressing the science of the paper, but the omitted, yet verified medical complications and deaths of the patients, as well as non-existent animal tests. Two of three peer reviewers simply chose not to believe me and my evidence, one of the reasons was: my blog site where I published it is not peer reviewed. I was also decreed to be scientifically incompetent, driven by personal vendetta against poor Walles (who are presently suing me at court for reporting about these transplants) and simply as a liar, who made all these things up. At the same time, the notorious third reviewer warns the editor that the journal’s readers must never see or hear of my accusations. Continue reading “My Walles trachea transplant reporting fails peer review” →

The vexatious life-saving question of cadaveric tracheas

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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