Surgeon on trial over experimental windpipe transplants

STOCKHOLM: An Italian doctor who made headlines for pioneering windpipe surgery went on trial in Sweden yesterday, charged with assault for performing the experimental procedure.

Paolo Macchiarini won plaudits in 2011 after claiming to have performed the world’s first synthetic trachea transplants while a surgeon at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute.

The procedure was hailed as a breakthrough in regenerative medicine.

But allegations soon emerged that the risky procedure had been carried out on at least one individual who had not been critically ill at the time of the operation.

Dressed in a blue suit, the 63year-old listened to translated audio as prosecutors listed the charges of “aggravated assault” against three patients.

The Karolinska Institute has confirmed that the three individuals have since died, but did not directly link the deaths to the operations.

“Paolo Macchiarini has carried out the surgery with complete disregard for science and tried experience,” prosecutor Karin Lundstrom-Kron told the court.

Macchiarini has maintained they constituted treatments and not experiments, and denied being criminally responsible.

“His only motivation has been to treat the patients,” his lawyer Bjorn Hurtig told the court.

In 2013, the Karolinska hospital suspended all transplants and refused to extend Macchiarini’s contract as a surgeon.

A year later, several surgeons at the hospital filed a complaint alleging that Macchiarini had downplayed the risks of the procedure.

Macchiarini carried out three surgeries at Karolinska University Hospital – where he also worked as a surgeon – in 2011 and 2012, using an artificial windpipe made of plastic and coating it with the patient’s own stem cells.

Together with his colleagues, he performed a total of eight such transplants between 2011 and 2014, the five others taking place in Russia.