The trial of a former Italian surgeon accused of assaulting patients by carrying out pioneering yet experimental windpipe transplants began in Sweden on April 27.
Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a stem cell scientist, is charged with aggravated assault against three of his patients for performing the procedure in which he created the world’s first windpipe partially made from a patient’s own stem cells.
Macchiarini, 63, was credited as a pioneer for creating the world’s first “synthetic” trachea in 2011 while he was a surgeon at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.
The trachea was made of a biocompatible material and partly from stem cells from the patient, and was hailed as a breakthrough in regenerative medicine at the time.
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