Exteriors of the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm (Sweden).
A Swedish court has opened the trial against the Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini for the controversial trachea transplants performed in the Stockholm Karolinska Institutecenter linked to Medicine Nobel Prize.
Macchiarini, who had previously headed the Thoracic Surgery Service at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelonais accused of a serious crime of aggression with injuries for the death of three patients, to whom they were implanted synthetic tracheas in 2011 and 2012 in the Karolinska, as reported by EFE.
The prosecution maintains that the method lacked solid scientific basis and had not been sufficiently tested, so he believes that the surgeon, who pleads not guilty, acted with “particular disregard” causing “long suffering” to patients.
The trial is the culmination of a long and controversial process that has lasted for more than a decade, which has led to several files, resignations, investigations and has called into question the most prestigious medical institution in Sweden, the Karolinska Institute, international benchmark of excellencewhere the winners of the Medicine Nobel Prize.
World’s first trachea transplant
Macchiarini, who had directed in 2008 at the Barcelona Clinic the world’s first trachea transplant, was hired two years later as visiting professor at Karolinska and chief physician at the institute’s hospital, where he was linked until 2016.
Although in 2011 a file for falsifying data in a scientific articleKarolinska renewed his contract.
The ‘Macchiarini case’ resurfaced at the beginning of 2016 due to a report on Swedish public television that criticized the lack of previous trials and information to patients in operations performed by the surgeon in Sweden and in other countries.
The revelations sparked resignation of directors of the instituteincluding the rector, and of the Secretary of the Nobel Prize Committee for Medicinein addition to the dismissal of the surgeon, in a case that has been considered the biggest scandal in the country’s history of medicine and that it was feared it could damage the Nobel’s reputation.
A first investigation by the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office concluded in October 2017 that it could not be proven that Macchiarini’s actions caused the death of patients or damage to their bodies, although it was critical of his behavior, considering it “in conflict with science and tried practices“.
But the senior prosecutor reopened the case a year later after a claim of relatives of deceased patientsand in September 2020 an accusation was made against the surgeon, which led to the trial that has already begun and is expected to end on May 23.
A commission created by the Clinic concluded in September 2016 that both the trachea transplant performed there and the article about it that was subsequently published in the journal ‘Lancet‘ had been ‘correct’.
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