THE DOCTOR BEHIND THE DISPUTED VIRUS DATA
Dr Sapan Desai, who supplied the data for two prominent and later retracted studies, is said to have a history of misrepresenting information in pursuit of his ambitions
With a Harvard professor, Dr Sapan Desai produced two studies in May that instantly disrupted clinical trials. The now-tainted US studies helped sow confusion and erode public confidence in scientific guidance |
Acollege degree at 19. A medical school graduate with a Ph.D. at 27.
By the time he completed training in vascular surgery in 2014, Dr Sapan Desai had cast himself as an ambitious physician, an entrepreneur with an MBA and a prolific researcher published in medical journals.
Then the novel coronavirus hit, and Desai seized the moment. With a Harvard professor, he produced two studies in May that almost instantly disrupted multiple clinical trials amid the pandemic.
One study’s findings were particularly dramatic, reporting that anti-malaria drugs like hydroxychloroquine, which President Donald Trump promoted, were linked to increased deaths of Covid-19 patients. But that study and another were retracted in June by the renowned journals that had published them, weeks after researchers around the world suggested the data was dubious. Desai, who declined to share the raw information even with his co-authors, claimed it was culled from a massive trove acquired by Surgisphere, a business he started during his residency.
Tainted studies
The now-tainted studies helped sow confusion and erode public confidence in scientific guidance when the United States was already deeply divided over how to respond to the pandemic. And the antimalaria drugs cited in the papers have continued to generate controversy, as new research prompted some scientists to petition for expanding their use against the coronavirus, despite Food and Drug Administration warnings against them.
While the journal debacle has shaken the broader scientific community, many people who have known Desai, 41, described him as a man in a hurry, a former whizz-kid willing to cut corners, misrepresent information or embellish his credentials as he pursued his ambitions.
In interviews, more than a dozen doctors who worked with him during training and residency said they had often found him to be an unreliable physician who seemed less interested in patient care than in the medical journal he founded and his company, branded early on as a medical publishing business.
Untrustworthy
“You couldn’t trust what he said,” said Dr Vanessa Olcese, a former chief resident who worked with Desai at Duke University Medical Centre. “You would verify everything that he did and take everything he did with a grain of salt.”
His performance there and during a later fellowship at the University of Texas Health Science Centre raised questions about whether he would be permitted to move to the next level of training. In both instances, he was.
More recently, in February, Desai left his job at a community hospital in a Chicago suburb where he had worked as a surgeon since 2016. He was named as a defendant in three medical malpractice lawsuits last year, court records show.
The New York Times interviewed more than two dozen people who have known Desai over the past two decades.
Desai, who declined to be interviewed for this article and did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has defended his company’s data. In an interview in late May, he said it was his “life’s work” to build a company that could provide lifesaving clinical insights to make “the world a better place.”
“We did this because it was an opportunity to help. We’re not making any money from this,” he said. “This is why I went into medicine.”
Malpractice cases
After his residency at Duke, Desai obtained an MBA in three months from Western Governors University, an online university based in Salt Lake City, the school confirmed. Then, after starting a vascular surgery fellowship at the University of Texas at Houston, he ran into trouble. He had so antagonised some supervisors that they asked the department chairman to expel him, said Dr Hazim
Safi, who was then in that role.
“Some of the attending staff didn’t like his behaviour and didn’t want him to graduate,” Safi said in an interview.
At Desai’s most recent post at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, Illinois, he became involved in at least four medical malpractice cases that are still pending, including three filed in 2019.
Big data, big dreams
By the time Desai left the hospital earlier this year — a hospital spokeswoman said he voluntarily resigned for personal reasons — the novel coronavirus was raging in China and spreading to other countries.
For Desai, whose entrepreneurial projects had grown to include a health data analytics company, the crisis was an opportunity to fulfil his dream of using big data to study outcomes and improve care. The public’s appetite for information was insatiable, and journals were publishing studies faster than ever.
Over the years, Surgisphere had developed a product called QuartzClinical that offered health centres a platform using data analytics to improve outcomes. Desai said the product had enabled Surgisphere to amass a giant registry with anonymised electronic health records from more than 1,200 hospitals and health centres, with data about more than 240 million patient encounters in 45 countries.
Covid severity scoring tool
The new coronavirus put the company on the map. One of Desai’s projects early this year was to develop a Covid-19 severity scoring tool using data he said came from tens of thousands of registry patients. He offered the tool free to a non-profit based in Cape Town, South Africa, saying it could identify high-risk patients and help allocate scarce medical resources in remote areas. (The group, the African Federation for Emergency Medicine, rescinded its endorsement of the tool after the studies were retracted.)
Desai also teamed with Dr Mandeep Mehra, a Harvard Medical School professor, and several others to turn out papers about Covid-19 that were ostensibly based on the patient registry. In May, he won the equivalent of academic medicine’s jackpot: publication in two of the world’s most prestigious journals.
‘Mother of all studies’
The first paper, citing data from 8,910 Covid patients at 169 hospitals in Asia, North America and Europe, reported that cardiovascular disease increased the risk of bad outcomes but put to rest concerns that blood pressure medications were harmful (it even seemed to suggest a benefit). It
was published May 1 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The next paper, published May 22 in The Lancet, evaluated anti-malaria drugs that Trump has promoted as antidotes to the coronavirus. The researchers claimed to have analysed the outcomes of nearly 100,000 Covid-19 patients from 671 hospitals on six continents. The results were sensational: Patients treated with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were up to five times as likely to have abnormal heart rhythms as other patients — and were at higher risk of dying.
Although it was an observational study, considered to provide relatively weak scientific evidence, the paper’s effect was felt around the world. A physician commenting on CNN called it “the mother of all studies,” and investigators including the World Health Organisation halted clinical trials of the drugs. (Some have since resumed.)
The paper drew scrutiny from scientists who demanded to know more about the data. Desai’s co-authors, conceding they had never seen the raw data, called for an independent review, but Desai balked, invoking confidentiality agreements. On June 4, both journals retracted the studies.
Surgisphere’s flashy website has been dismantled. Desai, who gave several interviews before the studies were retracted, has gone silent.
You couldn’t trust what he [Dr Sapan Desai] said. You would verify everything that he did and take everything he did with a grain of salt.” Dr Vanessa Olcese | Ex-colleague, Duke University Medical Centre