Delaeres damning criticisms appeared in major medical journals, including the Lancet, but werent taken seriously by Karolinskas leadership. Meanwhile, Macchiarinis career soared. From November 2011 to June 2014, Paolo Macchiarini gave transplants to Christopher Lyles, Yulia Tuulik, Alexander Zozulya, Yesim Cetir, Hannah Warren (a 3-year-old), Sadiq Kanaan, and Dmitri Onogda. Dr. Delaere developed another innovative method, performed on nine patients so far: implanting a section of donor trachea in a patients forearm for weeks until it develops blood vessels and can replace part of the patients trachea. Therefore, of all the medically ill individuals Paolo has ever provided a biological or synthetic implant to, at least 8 of them allegedly died due to his misconduct in research, failure to provide proper post-operative care, and/or his disregard for ethical practices. Thats something that was new to us, so we need to analyze that, Lundstrm-Kron says. The fact that he could keep all the details straight and compartmentalize these different lives and lies is really amazing.. The scandal meant theres an amazing amount of scrutiny, he said. It is thus likely she has since passed away. Benita told CrimeFeed that Paolo always paid for everything and was "extremely generous." Most, including Andemariam Beyene, are now dead. In addition to his partner of over 30 years, he also had a special next woman. A High-Flying Italian Surgeons Fall From Grace, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/world/europe/macchiarini-windpipe-surgeon-deaths.html. Instead, they found him guilty of negligence and the lesser charge of causing bodily harm. Florida Also, in such a highly competitive environment, people are keen to show allegiance to their superiors and wary of criticising them. This went on for three years until, just recently, Grinnemo was cleared of all wrongdoing. But as time went on, she could not resist her connection to the dashing surgeon and she violated the number one rule of journalism: Never get involved with a person you're reporting on. And Murphy found that Macchiarinis claims about the wedding were almost all untrue and that the surgeon was married and had been for nearly 30 years. The nine-centimeter transplant replaced all but two centimeters of her trachea. Countless news stories declared it a medical breakthrough. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. In 2017, Paolo worked at a university in Russia, where he was given a federal grant for oesophagus research on primates, and operated on baboons rather than humans. Its love of human interest stories makes it sympathetic to unproven therapies. ONE Super Series Benita Alexander on attending Paolo Macchiarinis criminal trial in Sweden Alexander said she attended Macchiarini's trial for closure, seven years after she was Other trachea replacement attempts include transplanting part of a donors frozen, preserved aorta, the bodys main artery, and fabricating tracheas from patients own chest muscles and rib cartilage. Scientists can also suffer from false hope. This set a dangerous example. A review of public records in Italy found that Paolo was never divorced from Emanuela Pecchia, his wife of nearly 30 years. They shared a happy relationship. The district court in Solna today found Paolo Macchiarini not guilty on other charges, including aggravated assault, relating to three patients he treated while working for the famed Karolinska Institute (KI). At the time, Macchiarini was working at Swedens Karolinska Institute, which awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine every year. The operation, performed at one of the worlds most prestigious medical universities, part of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, was hailed as revolutionary. The other side is flat and mobile to move air to the lungs. By the time the program aired, in mid-2014, the couple were planning their marriage. Here are 13 more things about him: He married Pecchia in 1986. This was the start of a whirlwind romance that included five-star hotels, travel to far-flung locations, and extravagant shopping sprees. He has been convicted of research-related crimes in Italy and Sweden. And the TV shows second season, announced earlier this month, will cover the podcasts third, with Edgar Ramirez playing Paolo Macchiarini, and This Is Us star Mandy Moore playing Benita Alexander, an investigative journalist who falls into a whirlwind romance with the doctor. No, he was just caring for his patients who were, one and all, facing certain death with no other treatment options available and no time to waste. Dressed in a white lab coat or in surgical scrubs, with his broad, handsome face and easy charm, he certainly looked the part. And in 2014, four Karolinska University Hospital doctors filed two separate reports claiming that Macchiarinis scientific papers described exaggerated the positive results of the operations and incorrectly describe[d] the postoperative status of the patients and the functionality of the implant, the timeline says. Paolo grew close to Alexander's daughter [Investigation Discovery], He was incredibly charming, worldly smart, sophisticated, and seemed very gentle," Benita told CrimeFeed. Minnesota In September, a Swedish prosecutor indicted him on aggravated assault charges related to three trachea transplants. Georgia Teen Vanished In South Carolina, Search Continues For North Carolina Girl, 11, Whose Parents Didnt Report Her Missing For Weeks, Where Is Ella Goodie? Photographs document Ms. Seins trachea transformation: Her old windpipe looks raw and red, her new one smooth as porcelain. Bangkok 2023 Warner Bros. Beyenes death two and a half years after the operation, caused by the failure of his artificial airway, was a grueling ordeal. An alarmingly wide gap has grown between what we expect from stem cells and what they deliver. According to the Karolinska Institutes timeline of the Macchiarini case, the institute recruited Macchiarini as a visiting professor of regenerative medicine/stem cell biology in 2010, and the associated Karolinska University Hospital gave him a part-time contract as a consultant and surgeon around the same time. COVID-19 In 2016, Claudia returned to the Hospital Clinic to have her left lung removed, and as per the last reports, she is now alive and doing relatively well. I didnt want the fairy tale to end., Alexander also hired a private investigator, a former Pennsylvania State Police detective named Frank Murphy. None other than Pope Francis would officiate, and his papal palace in Castel Gandolfo would serve as the venue. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. In April 2017, the university terminated his project. But some of Alexander's friends began to become suspicious. In January 2016, Macchiarini received an extraordinary double dose of bad press. Benita decided to get in touch with private investigator Frank Murphy. Each new scientific discovery brings a flood of stories about how it will revolutionise medicine one day soon. The Italian surgeon and his Italian wife Emanuela Pecchia have one son and one daughter. Next month, she will turn 57. They identified many problems with the way the twin organisations handled him. The transplants, performed on patients from the United States and other countries, were heralded as inaugurating a regenerative medicine revolution. As the home of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine, one of its ambitions is to create scientific celebrities. Most protagonists on medical dramas are modern-day heroes. Dr. Genden examines the new trachea by inserting a scope in a hole he left in her neck, which hell eventually close. Disgraced Italian surgeon convicted of criminal harm to stem cell patient. Nor did they impress the institutes ethics council when Delaere lodged a formal complaint. So I called and called till I got an appointment., Dr. Genden said Ms. Sein beseeched him for the transplant, saying, You need to do this for me or Im going to end my life.. Anyone can read what you share. "I started thinking that if this man is lying to me at such an egregious level, theres no way hes not doing this in his medical life," she told CrimeFeed. Her friends described him as "Mr. Big" from Sex and the City. Prior to this, he was regarded as a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine using both biological and synthetic scaffolds seeded with patients own stem cells as trachea transplants. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 376, Issue 6600. Macchiarini told people that Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Vladimir Putin would attend the wedding, Andrea Bocelli would perform, and Pope Francis (a patient of his, or so he said) would officiate the ceremony, per Vanity Fair. Guided by several mentors, he delved into research and animal experiments, developing a transplant approach. Benita Alexander and Paolo Macchiarini in Venice, Italy [Investigation Discovery]. Michigan There was nothing anybody could do for these patients, said Dr. Genden, who became captivated by the problem in medical school 30 years ago after a patient with a tracheal tumor died. None of these institutions have faced the same kind of public scrutiny. The court ruling Thursday was in a case involving a Turkish woman named Yesim Cetir, who was the longest surviving of his patients at Karolinska. Still, noting that previous attempts didnt show documented success, he cautioned that longer-term results were needed before the technique should be embraced, adding, Lets see how it works and how you can do it in more patients.. Eduard Folayang In 2017, prosecutors in Sweden charged Macchiarini with manslaughter in connection with the three patients who had received transplants at KI in 2011 and 2012, all of whom had died: Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, a graduate student from Eritrea with a slow-growing cancer obstructing his windpipe; Christopher Lyles, a 30-year-old American with tracheal cancer; and Yesim Cetir, a teenager from Turkey whose trachea had been accidentally damaged during a previous surgery. I thought, If they do a transplant for everything, they should do a transplant for trachea, she recalled. North Carolina She told CrimeFeed that, looking back, it seemed odd to her she had not met many of Paolo's close friends in Barcelona. You can see this in the speed with which his breakthroughs were accepted. Macchiarinis fame had won him well-placed backers. However, the serious complications that Castillo suffered were, for a long time, kept very quiet. She became close to Paolo as she opened her heart to him about how hard it was for her daughter, then nine years old, to lose her father. While many in Sweden expressed disappointment at what they saw as the leniency of the sentence, given that prosecutors had asked for five years in prison, the verdict nonetheless represented the culmination of a stunning fall from grace for a once high-flying surgeon. Science and AAAS are working tirelessly to provide credible, evidence-based information on the latest scientific research and policy, with extensive free coverage of the pandemic. Ultimate Fighting Championship According to The New York Times, Macchiarini is an Italian surgeon who was found criminally liable this June for causing felony bodily injury to a Turkish woman named Yesim Cetir, a patient who had received one of his 3D-printed windpipes and later died. Her transformation follows a groundbreaking experimental procedure she underwent in January: the first time, medical experts believe, a donor trachea has been successfully directly transplanted into another person. You start to panic because you cant breathe., By early 2020, ethical approvals were in place, but the coronavirus pandemic held things up. They and their loved ones fall victim to false hope. Dr. Macchiarini received a conditional, or suspended, sentence, and was acquitted of assault charges related to two other patients who had also received the artificial organs from him at the Swedish facility. An unhappy result of this is the rise of pseudo-scientific therapies. We have, for example, a growing list of scientific celebrities who have committed major stem cell fraud. In their view, he was grossly misrepresenting his results and the health of his patients. But hes lost his reputation, and thats more important.. Disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who faked research relating to dangerous and largely discredited tracheal transplants, has been handed a 16 month prison sentence in Italy for forging documents and abuse of office. Colleagues accused him of manipulating his results, even warning of the harm caused by these so-called regenerative windpipes. Because mucus would clog her tube, she was constantly suctioning, constantly worried about her airway, and it becomes overwhelming, Dr. Genden said, like being held down in a swimming pool. Tennessee Selena died in a hospital due to a loss of blood and cardiac arrest, two weeks before her 24th birthday. According to the magazine, in 2012 he was charged in Italy with attempted aggravated fraud related to alleged efforts to persuade very ill patients to undergo radical surgery at facilities where he had privileges. The other patients were treated at hospitals in Barcelona, Florence, London, Moscow, Krasnodar, Chicago and Peoria. Prosecutors dropped the case a few months later, however, saying they didnt have sufficient evidence to prove manslaughter. In late 2014, four doctors in Sweden accused him of fraud, saying that he'd falsified data in six of the papers he had published. Stem-cell scientist Dr. Paolo Macchiarini was accused of wrongdoing during operations on three people between 2011 and 2014. But according to reports, Paolo cheated on his Emanuela Pecchia. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? As of late March, 6.5 percent of cells in the donor trachea were hers, with the proportion increasing, he said. All but one died following severe complications with the implants. Look out for a message in your inbox in. It is unclear whether Dr. Macchiarini is still practicing medicine, but his lawyer said in May that he had no income. As it turned out, Macchiarinis patients werent all at deaths door at the time he treated them. Nearly all of those patients have died. He was eventually dismissed from Karolinska. Paolo was a world-renowned surgeon who spoke six languages, mingled with the global elite, and resembled George Clooney. She pushed through his appointment despite the fact that he had some very negative references and dubious claims on his rsum. The popular press also has a lot to answer for. Even so, it wasnt until 2016 that the Karolinska Institute declined to renew his contract. Plus: A Chicago mother is arrested in connection to the murder of her 6-year-old son; the convicted killer Robert Durst dies at age 78; Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes sentencing date is set; and an LGBTQ+ rights movement hero is found dead in a Florida landfill. Heres this handsome Italian surgeon at the finest institution in the world, the Karolinska, and hes everything Im not: Hes got a beautiful head of hair, he drives a motorcycle, hes got an accent, hes incredibly charismatic and dynamic, Dr. Genden said. At night, when she connected her tracheal tube to a ventilator, the alarm kept going off to let people know that I stopped breathing, said Ms. Sein, who hated causing her family concern. Allegations also emerged that the risky procedure was performed on at least one person who was not critically ill at the time. An independent investigator agreed. Therefore, on June 12, 2008, at Hospital Clinic Barcelona, she received a cadaver trachea graft implanted as a bronchus transplant. Massachusetts In Macchiarinis case, the hope was that patients could be treated with stem cells taken from their own bone marrow. Death Season 2, Mandy Moore Joins Dr. It would be a star-studded event. Not just that, Paolo was also entangled in several other controversies. Philippines Four of Macchiarinis colleagues at KI, including Corbascio, filed official complaints in 2014 charging that several papers describing the surgeries deliberately left out serious complications in the patients. How climate change and forest management make wildfires harder to contain, Disparity in police response: Black Lives Matter protests and Capitol riot. Paolo Macchiarini is a thoracic surgeon. Ground-breaking work on synthetic organ transplants made Paolo Macchiarini one of the most famous doctors in the world. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. Any replacement trachea must be rigid or itll collapse like a straw in a McDonalds milkshake, Dr. Genden said. The story portrayed Macchiarini, who was already married at the time, as a serial fabulist who exaggerated or lied about degrees, academic appointments, and personal accomplishments. He was born in Basel, Switzerland to Italian parents. All three patients later died. She has since had the synthetic trachea removed. The Karolinska Institute was seduced by Macchiarini, said Dr. Gerdin. Talking about her spouse Thereafter it was all over the news. Gerdin says the conviction on one count still shows that health care doesnt stand above the law. Guided by a high-powered microscope, he used surgical thread half the diameter of a human hair. Dr. Gerdin said Dr. Macchiarini was allowed to continue his procedures for so long because the Karolinska Institute and its hospital allowed him to do so. And because it was built from Castillos own cells, she didnt need to be on any risky immunosuppressant drugs. Source: ABC Article continues below advertisement His relationship with Benita, Andemariam Beyene met up with Macchiarini in Iceland a year after his operation but later died Two more patients were also given transplants at the Karolinska Thats what our experience of medical research leads us to suspect. We will send you a maximum of two emails in, We will be in touch to remind you to contribute. Almost immediately after she was fitted with a synthetic trachea in August 2012, Ms. Cetirs condition began to rapidly deteriorate, according to the courts written judgment. He says prosecutors should have pressed for manslaughter charges because Macchiarini had no evidence that the tracheas he implanted would develop into normally functioning organs. In the first couple of years at Karolinska, he put plastic airways into three patients. If she talked for over five minutes, she had to stop because I couldnt breathe.. The first successful direct transplant of a trachea is a medical milestone that could help thousands of people with airways damaged by ventilators and other causes. Those few patients who are still alive including Castillo have survived in spite of the artificial windpipes they received. If there is a moral to this tale, its that we need to be wary of medical messiahs with their promises of salvation. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Macchiarinis argument that KI fully supported and encouraged the surgeries likely swayed the judges as well, he says. There he reinvented his technique. She remained in intensive care for more than three years at Karolinska University Hospital and underwent more than 200 surgical procedures. By 2011, he was working in Sweden at one of the worlds most prestigious medical universities, the Karolinska Institute, whose professors annually select the winner of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. A review of public records in Italy found that Paolo was never divorced from Emanuela Pecchia, his wife of nearly 30 years. In fact, the surgeon was still married to his wife of nearly 30 years. A life-saver and a game-changer. But colleagues suspected that Macchiarini was manipulating his results. Pennsylvania Also seduced by Macchiarini was former NBC News producer Benita Alexander, who met the surgeon in 2013 when she was working on A Leap of Faith, an NBC special about Macchiarini hosted by Meredith Vieira. Reports of their success always seemed like hot air to him. And investigations by both institute and the hospital found coverups regarding Macchiarinis work. Kevin Belingon "If I made a checklist of what I wanted a man to be, he had everything.". Talking about her spouse Paolo, he became infamous for research fraud and manipulative behavior. Karolinskas leadership expected big things from their superstar, things that would bring prestige and funding to the institute. The Karolinska Institute, alleging scientific misconduct, dismissed Dr. Macchiarini, who has long denied wrongdoing. Paolo, a visiting researcher at the prestigious Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, had shot to fame as the only doctor in the world who was able to use biological and synthetic scaffolds bathed in the patients' own stem cells for trachea transplants. Starting in 2011, Macchiarini performed three transplantations of synthetic tracheas at Karolinska University Hospital, but one of those patients died in 2012, the timeline reports. But Benita stood by her man and, she said, tried to help him through a tough time. There are people who go to jail for 5 years for not paying their taxes. Likewise the whole idea of a wedding: Macchiarini was still married to his wife of 30 years. Another was a Russian mother named Julia Tuulik, per BBC News. And fooled almost everyone. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. Hwang, Obokata and Macchiarini were all attracted to the hottest regions of stem cell research, where hope for a medical breakthrough was greatest. Emanuela Pecchia has been married to Paolo Macchiarini for over 30 years. The Karolinska Institute was seduced by Macchiarini, Gerdin told the newspaper. I could feel it in my lungs.. Paolo dropped another bomb when he told Benita that, despite the fact that both of them had been divorced, Pope Francis would officiate at their wedding. A White House source confirmed that Bill Clinton had never met Paolo. The maximum prison sentence for causing bodily harm is 4 years. She received another Remembering George Floyd: A year of protest. He says, Ive created this bioreactor and its stem cells and it makes tracheas. And its huge., Dr. Genden said that when he and colleagues questioned Dr. Macchiarini at a conference early on, in his bigger-than-life way he says, This is ridiculous, you dont know what youre talking about, it functions beautifully., Dr. Genden thought his work had become obsolete, so you basically shut down the lab, he said. In 2011, Dr. Macchiarini, a renowned leader in the field of regenerative medicine, took the medical world by storm when he built and implanted the worlds first bioartificial windpipe. My wife was the one who said, If you truly believe that people are dying from this and that you could maybe make a difference, you cant just fold up and go home, he said.