The Lancet has retracted two papers on the first tissue-engineered trachea transplants by disgraced former Karolinska Institute surgeon Paolo Macchiarini.
Macchiarini rose to fame after performing the world’s first synthetic organ transplant.
The Italian transplant surgeon was sentenced to 30 months in prison earlier this year after he was found guilty of gross assault against three patients on whom he tested synthetic tracheae.
He was charged over the experimental procedure carried out in 2011-12.
The retractions come after Sweden’s National Board for Assessment of Misconduct (NPOF in Swedish) found him guilty of misconduct involving the two articles, eight months after the journal issued expressions of concern for the two papers.
In the first paper, published in 2008, Macchiarini and his colleagues reported how they implanted a cadaveric windpipe seeded with stem cells into a 30-year-old woman.
The second paper in 2013 described how the patient fared over the next five years. The authors wrote that she ‘had a normal social and working life despite needing repeated bronchoscopic interventions’.
In fact, the woman described in the 2008 report suffered multiple complications, including respiratory failure and had to have surgery to remove her left lung, according to a report in the Lancet in 2019.
The retraction notice for Clinical transplantation of a tissue-engineered airway reads:
After The Lancet issued two expressions of concern in February 2023 for the original case description and the five-year follow-up Article, the Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct investigation into the five-year follow-up paper has led us to retract this paper.
‘During that investigation, it was confirmed that a stent was inserted in the patient’s trachea less than four months after the operation. The Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct found that the statement in that article that a “four-month follow-up showed no complications” and that omitting information that a stent was inserted constitutes falsification.
‘Similarly, the statement in the original report that “the graft immediately provided the recipient with a functional airway, improved her quality of life, and had a normal appearance and mechanical properties at four months” would also constitute falsification. We are, therefore, also retracting the article of the original case description.’
The retraction notice for The first tissue-engineered airway transplantation: Five-year follow-up results reads: ‘Further to the two expressions of concern The Lancet issued in February 2023 for the article presenting the five-year follow-up results of the case of tissue-engineered transplantation, the Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct has concluded in an investigation into this paper that it ‘contains fabrication and falsification in several places, and three falsified figures. We are therefore now retracting this article together with the original description of this case.’
The retractions are the third and fourth for Macchiarini from The Lancet.
In June, it was announced there is to be a Netflix documentary series about the disgraced surgeon and his conviction of gross assault for implanting artificial windpipes in patients who later died.
