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Sapan Desai

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

Chief executive of Surgisphere, whose hospital database underlay COVID-19 studies that The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine retracted in June 2020.

Identity and role

Sapan S. Desai, M.D., Ph.D., is a vascular surgeon who ran Surgisphere Corporation. The company's claimed hospital database was the data source for two COVID-19 papers in 2020, one in The Lancet on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine and one in the New England Journal of Medicine. Both were retracted in June 2020 after the data could not be independently verified. The Scientist described him in October 2020 as "the embattled vascular surgeon and CEO of the now-defunct Surgisphere Corporation."

Biography / career arc

Desai is a co-author, with Mandeep R. Mehra, SreyRam Kuy, Timothy D. Henry and Amit N. Patel, of the NEJM paper and of its retraction letter. The Scientist describes him as a vascular surgeon who held an Illinois medical license. Our records do not document his education or his earlier career.

Pandemic-relief / PPP-EIDL role

Desai's pandemic role was scientific, not in the relief programs. On June 4, 2020 the NEJM published a retraction letter from all five authors of the Surgisphere-based paper: "Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate the primary data sources underlying our article." (N Engl J Med 2020;382:2582.)

The Lancet paper by Mehra and colleagues reported adverse events associated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine treatment. It was retracted by three of its authors "because the veracity of the data underlying this observational study could not be assured by the study authors," as a replacement Lancet commentary put it in July 2020. Christian Funck-Brentano, co-author of that commentary, told Retraction Watch he had written to Desai asking him to accept an audit and received no reply.

Their own relief

The SBA's public PPP loan-level data (September 30, 2024 release) list one loan to a borrower named Surgisphere Corporation, the company name The Scientist gives for the firm Desai led. JPMorgan Chase approved $21,780 on April 30, 2020 for Surgisphere Corporation of Barrington, Illinois, and $22,002.34 was forgiven on May 12, 2021. The data do not name the borrower's owners. They list no loan to a borrower named Sapan Desai, and the USAspending COVID-EIDL award files we searched list none to either name.

We found no criminal charge, civil enforcement action or court judgment against Desai or Surgisphere in our archive. The Scientist reported on October 23, 2020 that Desai had inactivated his medical license in Illinois, where multiple malpractice lawsuits against him were pending, and had obtained a license in Ohio. The malpractice suits are allegations; their outcomes are not in our records.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Our latest record of Desai is The Scientist's November 2, 2020 update: he had asked the State Medical Board of Ohio to inactivate his new license, writing that he would "not be practicing medicine in the state of Ohio." The same article calls Surgisphere "now-defunct." We have no later record of his work or location.

Sources held in this archive

  • Surgisphere Five Years On
  • Nader Pourhassan
  • Robert Kramer - Emergent BioSolutions profile dossier

Sources

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