Macchiarini was convicted of more research fraud

Disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini has been found guilty of falsifying a Lancet article about a tracheostomy in Spain. This is what was announced by the Research Misconduct Examination Board at Uhud Current resolution.

Discount also applies Two other researchers at Karolinska Institutet are among the authors of the Lancet article. The other authors are not active in Sweden and are not covered by Swedish ethics legislation.

Previous convictions and sentences

In 2017, as Läkemidelsvärden reported, the then Central Ethics Review Board convicted Paolo Macchiarini and some of his colleagues for research fraud. Then I discussed six articles published in scientific journals that dealt with Macchiarini’s experiences with artificial bronchial implants in Sweden.

These operations resulted And eventually also to the Court of Appeal, which sentenced him to prison on three counts of aggravated assault. It was about operations performed at Karolinska University Hospital in 2011 and 2012. The Court of Appeal found that the interventions were unjustified.

Macchiarini appealed this ruling to the Supreme Court.

Organ Transplantation Study 2008

The current conviction applies to one Article in Lancet Which was a five-year follow-up to A Transplantation performed in Barcelona in 2008.

The patient was one A 30-year-old woman with tuberculosis presents with severe shortness of breath. The disease has destroyed the main bronchus, the trachea, leading to the left lung.

The surgeons used a piece of donated human trachea, cleaned it of cells and covered it with stem cells from the woman herself. They then replaced part of the woman’s damaged windpipe with this graft.

I deleted important information

In a five-year follow-up, Paolo Macchiarini and colleagues reported mainly positive results from the surgery. But last year the article was taken to the Invalid Research Inspection Board, which had an expert look into the matter.

The expert has Among other things, comparing the information in the article with information about the patient’s documents in this case. The conclusion is that the authors of the Lancet article presented in many ways an incorrect picture of the patient’s condition after the procedure.

Among other things, the authors omitted the information that, within four months of the operation, they had to undergo surgery using a metal mesh to stabilize the operated part of the trachea. Instead, they wrote, the situation became complication-free after four months.

Guilty of misconduct

In addition, the expert concluded that three of the numbers in the article come from previous publications and are in fact from scans of other patients.

Review Board Search misconduct evaluates incorrect text information and fraudulent images as fraudulent. The Board states that both Macchiarini, who was the corresponding author, and two KI researchers who were co-authors are responsible for the content of the article.

The conclusion is that all three committed serious deviations from good research practice and are therefore guilty of research misconduct.

Scientists were surprised The procedures declined to comment.