Surgisphere Fallout Hits African Nonprofit’s COVID-19 Efforts

The company had helped develop a tool to aid decision-making in distributing limited medical equipment among coronavirus patients, but two high-profile retractions call into question the validity of Surgisphere’s work in toto.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Update (June 8): Surgisphere’s online COVID-19 Response Center and the four web tools hosted on it have been taken down from the company’s website.

Anonprofit organization in Africa that promoted a tool to help clinicians determine how to allocate limited medical resources among COVID-19 patients is walking back its recommendations in the wake of a scandal involving the company that collaborated on the project.

Surgisphere Corporation, an Illinois-based company founded in 2008 by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai, has come under fire in recent days for failing to obtain independent validation for datasets used in two high-profile studies in The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. Both papers are now retracted.

The Lancet study, which reported safety concerns about the use of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine in coronavirus patients, led the World Health Organization to suspend part of a clinical trial. Testing resumed last week ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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