Surgisphere
Surgisphere Corporation is an Illinois-based company founded in 2008 by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai.
Originally a producer of medical textbooks, Surgisphere has seen its profile as a data analytics company soar since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with the African Federation for Emergency Medicine (AFEM), an international nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting medical care across the continent, Surgisphere developed a COVID-19 Severity Scoring Tool to help clinicians decide how to allocate limited resources such as oxygen and mechanical ventilators to patients who need them most.
In the last couple of months, AFEM has promoted the tool for use in 26 countries across Africa (although The Scientist could not determine how many clinicians are currently using it), and several institutions had been set to launch validation studies of the tool in clinical settings. Those activities have all been halted following the retractions and a stream of questions about Surgisphere and Desai himself.
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 once scientists began to express doubts about the veracity of the data, and reports by The Scientist and other outlets exposed serious concerns about the company. 1)
The Surgisphere Scandal: What Went Wrong?
The Scientist - by Catherine Offord - Oct 1, 2020
The high-profile retractions of two COVID-19 studies stunned the scientific community earlier this year and prompted calls for reviews of how science is conducted, published, and acted upon. The warning signs had been there all along.
t sounds absurd that an obscure US company with a hastily constructed website could have driven international health policy and brought major clinical trials to a halt within the span of a few weeks. Yet that’s what happened earlier this year, when Illinois-based Surgisphere Corporation began a publishing spree that would trigger one of the largest scientific scandals of the COVID-19 pandemic to date.
At the heart of the deception was a paper published in The Lancet on May 22 that suggested hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug promoted by US President Donald Trump and others as a therapy for COVID-19, was associated with an increased risk of death in patients hospitalized with the disease. The study wasn’t a randomized controlled trial—the gold standard for determining a drug’s safety and efficacy—but it did purportedly draw from an enormous registry of observational data that Surgisphere claimed to have collected from the electronic medical records of nearly 100,000 COVID-19 patients across 671 hospitals on six continents.
The study was a medical and political bombshell. News outlets analyzed the implications for what they referred to as the “drug touted by Trump.” Within days, public health bodies including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) instructed organizers of clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment or prophylaxis to suspend recruitment, while the French government reversed an earlier decree allowing the drug to be prescribed to patients hospitalized with the virus.
Before long, however, cracks started appearing in the study—and in Surgisphere itself. Scientists and journalists noted that the Lancet paper’s data included impossibly high numbers of cases—exceeding official case or death counts for some continents and coming implausibly close for others. Similar data discrepancies were also identified in two previous studies that had relied on the company’s database. Inquiries by The Scientist and The Guardian, meanwhile, failed to identify any hospital that had contributed to the registry. See The Scientist’s investigation into Surgisphere Corporation 2)
It also emerged that, for a company claiming to have created one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated patient databases, Surgisphere had little in the way of medical research to show for it. Founded by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai in 2008 and employing only a handful of people at a time, the company initially produced textbooks aimed at medical students. It later dabbled in various projects, including a short-lived medical journal, before shooting to fame this year with its high-profile publications on health outcomes in COVID-19 patients. 3)