Disgraced surgeon goes on trial in Sweden over experimental trachea transplants

The disgraced Italian surgeon and researcher Paolo Macchiarini has gone on trial in Sweden charged with aggravated assault, 11 years after he first performed experimental transplants of synthetic windpipes on patients.

The trial centres on three transplants Macchiarini performed between 2011 and 2013, when a synthetic windpipe coated with the patient’s stem cells was surgically implanted in two men and a woman at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm. All three transplant recipients have died since they had the operations.

In 2019 Macchiarini was given a 16 month prison sentence in Italy for forging documents and abuse of …