Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, once hailed for his advances in trachea surgery, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on Wednesday by the Stockholm Court of Appeal for “aggravated mistreatment” of three patients.
The 64-year-old researcher rose to international fame in 2011 by performing the world’s first transplant of an artificial plastic trachea to be colonized by the patient’s stem cells.
Photo archives, AFP
This experimental procedure was first hailed as a great advance in the field of regenerative medicine before being disavowed because it was not based on sufficient foundations.
On Wednesday, the Stockholm Court of Appeal found that two of the three patients were not in a sufficiently serious condition at the time of the intervention, and “could have remained alive for a significant period without” it.
The third patient was in an emergency situation “but the procedure was despite that, unjustifiable”, continued the court which affirms that the surgeon acted intentionally.
“The intention to harm is the allegation, the most terrible accusation that can be made against a doctor”, reacted during a press conference the fallen surgeon.
Contacted by AFP, Björn Hurtig, his lawyer, said he was going to appeal the judgment. “My client is very tormented,” he said.
Paolo Macchiarini was a guest researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where the assembly that awards the Nobel Prize for Medicine came from. He had operated between 2011 and 2014 eight people, three in Sweden and five in Russia.
Only one of his patients survived, having had the artificial windpipe designed and implanted by the doctor removed during an operation in Russia in 2014.
The three patients treated in Sweden died, although the direct link between their deaths and the surgeries has not been established.
At first instance, the surgeon had been found guilty of “bodily harm” to a patient, the court considering that his interventions went against generally accepted and scientifically approved practices.
Charges had been dropped for the other two patients.
Found guilty of scientific fraud by an outside committee, he was fired from the Karolinska Institute in 2016.
Scientific publication The Lancet had withdrawn in 2018 two articles by the surgeon, published in 2011 and 2012.