Paolo Macchiarini

Paolo Macchiarini (born August 22, 1958) is a Swiss-born Italian thoracic surgeon and a former researcher on regenerative medicine, who became known for research fraud and manipulative behavior. Previously he was considered a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine using both biological and synthetic scaffolds seeded with patients' own stem cells as trachea transplants, and he was a visiting researcher on a temporary contract at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden from 2010. Macchiarini has been accused of research misconduct and unethically performing experimental surgeries, even on relatively healthy patients. Seven of the eight patients who received one of his synthetic trachea transplants have died. Also, an article in Vanity Fair suggested that Macchiarini had falsified some of his academic credentials on résumés. Similar accusations have been published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet according to which Macchiarini's claim to have been a professor at universities in Hannover and Barcelona has turned out to be false. The secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, , resigned in February 2016, owing to his involvement in recruiting Macchiarini to Karolinska Institutet in 2010. Shortly afterwards the vice chancellor, , who in 2015 had cleared Macchiarini of scientific misconduct also resigned. In 2013 Karolinska terminated its clinical relationship with Macchiarini but allowed him to continue as a researcher; in February 2016 Karolinska announced that it would not renew Macchiarini's research contract, which was due to expire in November, and the next month Karolinska terminated the contract. After being dismissed from Karolinska, he worked at the Kazan (Volga region) Federal University in Russia, until the university terminated his project in April 2017, effectively firing him. After a one-year medico-legal investigation, the attorney general's office announced in October 2017 that Macchiarini had been negligent in the four of the five cases investigated due to the use of devices and procedures not supported by evidence, but that a crime could not be proven because the patients might have died under any other treatment given. Also in October, Sweden's national scientific review board found scientific misconduct by Macchiarini and his co-authors in six papers about the procedures, and called for them to be retracted.