The Lancet today retracted two papers by former Karolinska Institutet surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, whose professional and personal escapades have made headlines for more than a decade and who has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for causing bodily harm to his patients.

The move comes a month after Sweden’s National Board for Assessment of Misconduct (NPOF in Swedish) said it had found Macchiarini guilty of misconduct involving the two articles, eight months after the journal issued expressions of concern for the two papers, and five years after Macchiarini had already been found to have committed misconduct in related work.

As we reported in February:

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; in the second, from 2013, they described how the patient fared over the next five years. Despite needing repeated bronchoscopic interventions, the authors wrote, she “had a normal social and working life.”

But:

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 2019 Lancet report.

The retraction notice for “Clinical transplantation of a tissue-engineered airway” reads:

After The Lancet issued two Expressions of concern in February, 2023 1,  2 for the original case description 3 and the 5-year follow-up Article, 4 the investigation by the Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct 5 into the 5-year follow-up paper has led us to retract this paper.6 During that investigation, it was confirmed that a stent was inserted in the patient’s trachea less than 4 months after the operation. The Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct 5 found that the statement made in that Article4 that a “4-month follow-up showed no complications” and that omitting information that a stent was inserted constitutes falsification. Similarly, the statement in the original report3 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 4 months” would also constitute falsification.5 We are, therefore, also retracting the Article of the original case description.

And the retraction notice for “The first tissue-engineered airway transplantation: 5-year follow-up results” reads:

Further to the two Expressions of concern The Lancet issued in February, 2023 1,  2 for the Article presenting the 5-year follow-up results3 of the case of tissue-engineered transplantation, 4 the Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct 5 has concluded in an investigation into this paper that it “contains fabrication and falsification in several places, and three falsified figures (4, 5 and 6C)”. We are therefore now retracting this Article3 together with the original description of this case. 6

The retractions are the third and fourth for Macchiarini from The Lancet, which has faced criticism for many years for how long it took to retract the fraudulent paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues that has been used as evidence that vaccines cause autism.

Patricia Murray and Peter Wilmshurst, who have been chronicling the problems in Macchiarini’s work for years, and were among those calling in the BMJ for the retraction of one of the now-retracted papers last year, told Retraction Watch they welcomed the decision to retract:

We are concerned that the decision to retract the fraudulent articles has taken more than 5 years since the Lancet received irrefutable evidence that the original 2008 paper made false claims and as a result the 2014 paper was also false. The Lancet ignored requests from doctors, scientists and the chairs of the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee.

In a comment we make available in full here, they continued:

Again the Lancet’s reputation for correcting the scientific record has been harmed. Some may wonder which other articles in the Lancet the editors are failing to retract when they know they are false.

And, they said:

The wider concern is that other senior authors on the 2008 paper and their institutions have known for some years that the article is false.

Murray and Wilmshurst referred specifically to co-author Martin Birchall, formerly of University of Bristol and now at University College London, who they said “continued to perform tracheal transplants using the original false Macchiarini-Birchall technique after Macchiarini stopped doing so.”

They conclude: 

It may be no coincidence that while UCL has repeatedly refused to get Birchall to retract the paper, he and his colleagues have been awarded massive grants from public funds to extend the research in this flawed technology at UCL.

Macchiarini’s story – which also includes his romantically scamming an NBC producer – has spawned multiple documentaries, a fictional dramatization, and even an opera. He first came to our attention in 2012.

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