STOCKHOLM – A Swedish appeals court on Wednesday increased the prison sentence for an Italian surgeon over experimental stem cell trachea transplants on three patients who died.
dr Paolo Macchiarini made headlines in 2011 for performing the world’s first stem cell trachea transplant at Sweden’s leading hospital and was not sentenced to prison by a lower court.
However, the Svea Court of Appeal concluded that two of the three patients who later died were not in an emergency situation, while the procedure could not be justified in the third. The Court of Appeal sentenced the Italian scientist to two and a half years in prison for causing the deaths of three people between 2011 and 2014.
“Bodily harm and suffering have been inflicted on the patients,” the appeals court said of the two men and one woman. The patients, so the conclusion, “could have lived for a considerable period of time without the interventions.”
Macchiarini denied any criminal wrongdoing. Macchiarini, once considered a leader in regenerative medicine, is credited with creating the world’s first trachea made partially from a patient’s stem cells.
On June 16 the Solna District Court Macchiarini was acquitted of two assault charges and sentenced him to a suspended sentence in the third case.
In its verdict, the Court of Appeal declared that Pacchiarini “acted with intent to be indifferent.”
“Macchiarini was aware that the procedures would cause physical harm and suffering to the patients and that although he had hoped that the method would work, he was indifferent to the realization of the risks.”
The court concluded that his actions “were not acts of impulsiveness but rather planned interventions and therefore there was room for reflection,” Chief Justice Maria Holcke said in a statement.
Maccharini said he felt he was being treated like “a war criminal.”
“We performed the transplant in good faith,” Macchiarini said, adding that he had not read an English version of the judgment to fully understand its content.
His lawyer, Bjorn Hurtig, said they would appeal.
“We haven’t given up, this game isn’t over yet,” he was quoted as saying by Swedish media.
Macchiarini was fired from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute in March 2016 for violating medical ethics after he was accused of falsifying his CV and misrepresenting his work. In December 2018, Sweden decided to reopen a previously closed investigation into three cases.
Authorities accused him of inappropriately operating on the same three people who later died between 2011 and 2014, but Maccharini has not been accused of killing the patients.
When Macchiarini’s first tracheal transplant was reported in the medical journal Lancet in 2008, it was hailed as a breakthrough in regenerative medicine. It was believed that Macchiarini’s new airways – made in part from the patient’s stem cells – would herald a new era in which new organs could be made in the laboratory.
He provided artificial tracheae to 20 patients from countries such as Spain, Russia, Iceland, Great Britain and the United States.
Critics say Macchiarini circumvented medical ethics by performing dangerous procedures with no proven benefit and that he made up descriptions of his patients’ conditions.
In 2019, an Italian court sentenced Macchiarini to 16 months in prison for forgery and abuse of office.
Although an independent Swedish commission found numerous problems in Macchiarini’s work, he denied the allegations, saying they were false.
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