A Swedish appeals court has sentenced an Italian surgeon to two and a half years in prison for pioneering tracheal surgery for a series of brutal attacks on patients.
Paolo Macchiarini gained recognition in 2011 after claiming to have performed the world’s first synthetic airway transplant using stem cells while he was a surgeon at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, reports RTE.
The experimental method was hailed as a breakthrough in regenerative medicine.
However, soon there were allegations that the procedure was performed on patients who were not seriously ill at the time of the operation.
Three of his patients died in Sweden, although these deaths were not directly related to the operation.
A district court in May found him guilty of causing bodily harm to a patient, ruling that the procedures were not in accordance with “science and proven experience,” reports RTE.
Both the prosecution and defense appealed the lower court ruling, and this morning the Court of Appeals found him guilty of three counts of aggravated assault.
The Court of Appeal found that the procedures were carried out on two patients, even though they were “not in emergency situations” and “could have lived for a not insignificant amount of time without the interventions”, reports RTE.
The third patient was in an “emergency situation” but “the procedure was, despite this, unjustifiable,” the court said in a statement, reports RTE.
It was found that he acted with intent.
“These were not impulsive actions, these were planned interventions,” judge Maria Holcke said in the statement, reports RTE.
Together with his colleagues, 64-year-old Macchiarini performed a total of eight such transplants between 2011 and 2014 – three in Sweden in 2011 and 2012 and five in Russia.
Four out of five Russian patients also died, according to Swedish media reports.
Macchiarini insisted in court that the transplants were an alternative decision after exhausting all other options.
The surgeon was also employed at the research facility of the Karolinska Institute, which received the Nobel Prize in medicine.
An external review found him guilty of research misconduct in 2015, and the institute fired him in 2016 and found him guilty of scientific misconduct in 2018, reports RTE.
The medical journal The Lancet retracted two articles by Macchiarini in 2018.
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