Investigation found UBC researcher fabricated data, gave spinal patients ‘false hope.’ The public was not told

This story is a collaboration between CBC News and the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF).

A celebrated Vancouver researcher used fabricated data and hid evidence of infected wounds to falsely claim his patented skin treatment could heal years-old bed sores in a matter of weeks, according to a leaked report.

If these results had been real, a product known as Meshfill would have been “close to miraculous” for people with spinal cord injuries, according to one expert. But investigators say they weren’t real, and the public was never informed about an investigation that uncovered numerous examples of misconduct during a clinical trial for the liquid skin substitute.  

The Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) and CBC News have obtained a 64-page report about University of British Columbia (UBC) plastic surgery professor Aziz Ghahary’s actions during a pilot study for Meshfill. It lays out how he presented falsified results to the public on several occasions, violated conflict of interest guidelines and was even accused of bullying by another researcher. 

The March 2021 document, which was written by a UBC-appointed investigative committee of three outside experts, says Ghahary “abandoned his scholarly integrity in his pursuit of his attempt to establish that Meshfill should be used as a treatment for chronic pressure ulcer wounds” — also known as bed sores. Despite his public claims of success, none of the pressure wounds in the pilot study had healed and some became infected.

“These false claims gave patients and funders false hope by falsely claiming that Meshfill had quickly healed chronic pressure ulcer wounds. He also potentially endangered the health of future human trial subjects when Dr. Ghahary falsely claimed that there had been no adverse effects during the pilot study,” reads the report.

Ghahary left his job at UBC shortly after the investigation was completed in 2021. He’d worked there since 2005.

The lack of public notice about the findings raises some questions for Leigh Turner, director of the Centre for Health Ethics at the University of California, Irvine.

“I think the findings of the report are extremely serious,” Turner said. “I would hope that this is a really relatively extreme example of violation of scholarly integrity. But there presumably are other cases and there presumably are other investigative reports that are not seeing the light of day. That’s a problem.”

UBC spokesperson Matthew Ramsey said he could only confirm that Ghahary’s employment at the university ended in 2021.

“Privacy law prevents UBC from commenting on allegations of scholarly integrity you’ve raised related to Dr. Ghahary’s research at UBC,” Ramsey wrote in an email. 

“Scholarly integrity investigation reports contain personal information that UBC, as a public body, is required to protect from disclosure under FIPPA (the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act). UBC does not have the legal authority to publish/share this type of personal information.”

Tarek Elneweihi, a lawyer who represents Ghahary, wrote in an email that his client “has nothing to hide in relation to his career as a scientist and is proud of his career achievements,” but was not able to respond to questions about the report.

“Dr. Ghahary is legally bound by confidentiality obligations that prevent him from commenting on the matters you have raised — even to defend himself. These restrictions are comprehensive and prohibit him from addressing the contents of any internal documentation, the processes involved, or the surrounding context,” Elneweihi wrote.

He noted that Ghahary is now 83 years old and is completely retired from research work. 

Meshfill never reached the market in Canada and should not be confused with the cosmetic procedure advertised online.

Jocelyn Maffin, associate director of service delivery for Spinal Cord Injury B.C., said she would have been thrilled to learn that a product like Meshfill could heal a pressure ulcer wound within a few weeks.

“It would be close to miraculous,” she said. “I don’t think we have anything even close to that right now.”

These wounds, which are sometimes called pressure injuries, form when there is prolonged pressure on the skin because of immobility, often when someone is bedridden or uses a wheelchair. 

People with spinal cord injuries are particularly vulnerable because they may not be able to feel the numbness or tingling that signals a wound is forming, or have the ability to shift their bodies regularly to prevent them.

“Pressure injuries have the biggest impact on quality of life of any of the complications common to people with spinal cord injuries,” Maffin said.

These wounds can lead to serious infection and even death. Superman actor Christopher Reeves reportedly died from an infected bed sore. They can also produce odours and require patients to spend long periods in uncomfortable positions, often leading to isolation and depression, Maffin said. 

‘An apology is warranted’

There was no announcement when Ghahary left his job at the university, and he continues to serve on the scientific advisory board of a Canadian biomedical company and has occasionally given interviews about his career.

He also received close to $80,000 from UBC for goods and services in 2023 and 2024, according to the university’s financial statements. Ramsey declined to provide further details about those payments, citing privacy and confidentiality concerns, but referred the IJF and CBC News to UBC’s inventions policy.

The only possible public reference to the misconduct investigation that the IJF and CBC News were able to identify was an anonymized six-sentence entry on a UBC website that says a faculty member committed several instances of scholarly misconduct in 2019, including data falsification and fabrication, and breaches of conflict of interest rules.

“The findings were reported to several different funding agencies. The faculty member is no longer affiliated with the university,” the entry says.

Ramsey said he could not confirm whether that entry is about Ghahary.

Turner wants to know what the study participants were told, arguing they deserve full disclosure.

“I actually think an apology is warranted,” he said.

Turner has a long list of unanswered questions about issues that aren’t addressed in the report.

“We don’t know, for example, has UBC initiated any reforms since this investigative report was submitted? Have they changed how they oversee clinical studies? Have there been changes to how they train their researchers? How have they addressed this?” he asked.

“I don’t see any evidence at all of any kind of conversation that there’s lessons being learned from this report more broadly at institutions across Canada, and I think that’s because this is not a report that’s been distributed in any kind of way.”

Ramsey declined to answer questions about any changes that the university has made as a result of the investigation, or whether study participants were informed about the findings.

But Turner stressed that his concerns about the lack of disclosure aren’t specific to UBC. He has seen universities across North America taking a similar approach to misconduct findings.

He questioned why some version of the report, with redactions to protect people’s privacy, couldn’t be made public.

“When plane crashes take place, we don’t think that the privacy of the pilot is so important that we’re never going to discuss why it took place. That’s an example where one reason we do investigations is to learn what happened and to try and learn from that and ensure that it doesn’t happen again,” Turner said.

“When these investigative reports disappear from view and are never made public, there’s an important educational opportunity that just never takes place.”

Years of concerns about researcher’s conduct

The university opened the investigation into Ghahary in June 2019 after receiving a complaint from Dr. Anthony Papp, the report says. Papp, a plastic surgeon, had collaborated with Ghahary in the past, and was the principal investigator for the pilot study.

Papp declined an interview for this story, but wrote in an email that he believes the findings in the report should be public. He said he’d never filed a complaint like this before.

“For several years I tried to make him change his habits,” Papp wrote of Ghahary. 

Papp’s frustration is palpable in the report. It quotes an email in which he warned Ghahary he was considering filing a complaint about his misleading claims, writing, “Frankly, this is becoming unbearable. I keep pointing out the same concerns repetitively with absolutely no effect.”

At the time of the complaint, Ghahary was an acclaimed researcher in the field of plastic surgery, earning $242,960 from UBC in his last full year there.

He was the director of the Burn and Wound Healing Research Group at UBC, director of the B.C. Professional Firefighters’ Burn and Wound Healing Laboratory and a researcher at the International Collaboration On Repair Discoveries. He spent time as a member of UBC’s clinical research ethics board and held several patents on products designed to help heal skin damage.

Elneweihi, his lawyer, described Ghahary’s career as “illustrious.”

“Dr. Ghahary is internationally recognized for his pioneering work in wound healing, scar prevention, and regenerative medicine. His discoveries, such as critical anti-scarring molecules which revolutionized burn scar care, and a biomarker enabling early detection of rheumatoid arthritis … continue to benefit patients today,” Elneweihi wrote.

His patented product, Meshfill, entered the spotlight in 2017, when Ghahary competed in a Dragons’ Den-style contest called the “Innovators’ Challenge,” and won first prize for the product. The same year, he was awarded an Innovation and Translational Research Award from the Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) for Meshfill.

The second set of data

When the Meshfill pilot study was announced in 2018, VCHRI said the treatment “may solve the painful health burden of slow healing wounds.”

The trial was designed to test Meshfill’s safety and effectiveness as a treatment for 12 spinal cord patients with pressure ulcer wounds, according to the report. Papp would lead the project and an unnamed nurse in his clinic would apply the Meshfill and measure the wounds according to a detailed protocol.

The study protocol was approved by UBC’s clinical research ethics board, which was told that, as the patent holder, “Dr. Ghahary will have no involvement with patient recruitment or consenting as well as data collection and interpretation,” according to an application quoted in the report. 

This was crucial to ensuring the integrity of the trial, according to the experts interviewed for this story.

“One concern is that if someone is actively involved in conducting a clinical study — gathering data, interpreting data — and they have a financial stake, they may end up coming up with interpretations and findings that happen to coincide with their financial interests,” Turner explained.

But problems with the protocol began popping up before the study even began. 

The report says Ghahary exchanged emails with at least one spinal cord patient and promised to arrange treatment, even though the patient didn’t meet the study criteria and Ghahary wasn’t supposed to recruit study subjects. Then, when 12 appropriate spinal cord patients couldn’t be identified, the study was expanded to include patients with surgical wounds.

The nurse told the committee that throughout the trial, Ghahary and members of his lab would visit the clinic, speak with patients — even visiting one at home — and then record their own, second set of measurements, all against the approved protocol. 

The committee identified “significant discrepancies” between the Ghahary team’s data and the nurse’s official records, including cases where evidence of infection was not recorded or where improvements to wounds were exaggerated.

All of this is highly unusual, according to the experts interviewed for this story.

“There’s supposed to be one set of data, and it’s data that Dr. Gahary is not supposed to be playing a role in generating, because of his financial conflict of interest,” Turner said. “There’s also a breach of confidentiality here, because you have individuals from Ghahary’s lab who know these individuals.”

The nurse also told the investigative committee that Ghahary pressured her into performing additional treatments on most of the subjects, beyond what was allowed in the study protocol. She alleged that when she pushed back, Ghahary cornered her in an office and closed the door.

“When she was alone in the room with him, the nurse recalls clearly that Dr. Ghahary told her, ‘do you know how important this work is, how is it you don’t want to give up your time?'” the report says. “The nurse recalls that Dr. Ghahary continued to speak to her (and would not let her out of the room) until she agreed to perform the off-protocol treatments.”

Ghahary denied that this encounter ever happened, but the panel said it accepted the nurse’s version of events.

No ‘real change’ for spinal cord patients

In the end, Papp’s analysis suggested that none of the pressure ulcer wounds showed any “real change,” according to the report. The nurse told investigators “I would never use (Meshfill) for chronic wound healing” because of the infections she observed.

Only five patients with pressure ulcer wounds and five with surgery wounds participated in the study. Three of the surgery wounds healed completely, but none of the pressure ulcer wounds did, and a handful showed signs of infection at some point. 

But that isn’t the message Ghahary shared with the public.

In a 2018 application for ethics approval to expand the study, Ghahary wrote that the trial had found “significant improvement in healing of pressure ulcers of three patients whose wounds were not healed for the previous two-five years. In fact, the wounds of two of these patients completely healed in four weeks.”

A poster presentation Ghahary produced for a health research foundation proclaimed “potentially game-changing” results and suggested “newly-invented Meshfill liquid skin is treating formerly untreatable pressure ulcers.”

Ghahary also posted a testimonial video on YouTube, in which he introduced a patient from the trial but did not disclose that they had been treated for a surgery wound, rather than a pressure injury. 

“Dr. Ghahary intentionally gave the false impression in the video that the subject had a pressure ulcer wound … which had been healed in only two weeks,” the committee found.

Even after the misconduct complaint had been filed, Ghahary made similar claims in a September 2019 presentation at WorkSafeBC, the province’s workers’ compensation board (WCB).

“Remarkably, the WCB presentation, which took place during the course of this investigation included new false and exaggerated claims regarding the results of the pilot study,” the report says.

In his defence, Ghahary told the investigative committee he had believed that all of the study participants had pressure ulcer wounds, according to the report. But the panel roundly rejected that claim, writing, “it is clear that Dr. Ghahary had access to the full medical records of the subject patients as he included their detailed medical history as part of his presentations.”

‘How can you just falsify data?’

The pilot study was ultimately suspended before it was complete, and ethics approval for a follow-up study was revoked.

But the questions about what went wrong still linger.

Emmanuelle Marceau, a professor in the University of Montreal’s school of public health, said Ghahary’s apparent decision to falsify and fabricate data boggles the mind.

“Most young researchers are full of hope and good faith and they want to do well and participate in the well-being of people. It takes a long time to have a PhD and to become a researcher. It’s a lot of involvement and work and sacrifices that the person makes,” said Marceau. “How can you just falsify data?”

She said actions like these can have a troubling effect on public perception of science and the advice of health experts.

“It’s the trust, it’s the faith that the people put into science and the health system and the care they receive or the medication they take. When you have cases like that, it just shocks the whole (establishment), so to say, of research,” she said.