Northwestern Medicine surgeons in Chicago have performed the first lung transplant on an American survivor of COVID-19 using the lungs of another person who has recovered from the disease.
According to the hospital, the recipient, a 60-year-old health worker from Illinois, received life support after being diagnosed with COVID in May. He was moved to the Northwest and spent a week on the transplant list before coinciding with the donor, who recovered from the disease before dying from other causes.
Surgeons performed the transplant in February and announced it this week.
“This is a milestone for lung transplantation,” said Ankit Bharat, head of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program, noting that many of the 30 million Americans who have had COVID-19 are registered donor bodies.
“If we tell them‘ no ’just because they had COVID-19 in the past, we will drastically reduce the donor set and there is already a huge demand and supply gap,” he said.
Recently, surgeons began performing lung transplants on patients with COVID, which worried that increased demand would lead to a lack of available organs. The waiting list for lung transplants in the US hovers around 1,000, with a mortality rate of about 10%.
In January, Northwestern told The Daily Beast that it had received twice as many transplant requests as it usually receives in a given year, and other hospitals said they received several requests a week. At the time, Bharat and other transplant surgeons said it was crucial to expand the donor reserve to meet rising demand.
But last month, a Michigan woman died after receiving the lungs of a donor whose body was harboring the virus, although it initially turned out to be negative, showing that transmission could occur through organ donation. . Michael Ison, a specialist in infectious diseases and organ transplants in the Northwest, said many transplant centers unnecessarily shed donor organs for fear of a similar incident.
To prevent this from happening in this case, Northwestern doctors performed thorough tests to make sure the donor’s lungs were completely free of the virus, including a nasal swab and an examination of the donor’s lung fluid.
“If the swab and lung fluid are free of the virus again and the lung biopsy confirms that there is no permanent damage to the lungs, we can rely on the quality of the donor lungs,” Bharat said. “Our first patient from ‘COVID to COVID’ received beautiful, healthy lungs and continues to recover at an optimal rate.”
Northwestern has so far performed 14 lung transplants in patients with COVID; the University of Florida has performed more than 10. Doctors in Belgium successfully performed a lung transplant using the lungs of a woman believed to have COVID-19 last year. They considered the recovery of the recipient 90 days after surgery to be “excellent.”