Northwestern Medicine
Doctors had to remove the lungs as they were the source of the infection and kept the patient without the organs until he was stabilized enough to receive a transplant.
A team of surgeons in the United States kept a patient in critical condition I live for two days without lungsusing a specially designed artificial system while waiting for a transplant. More than two years later, the patient completely recovered and now has normally functioning donor lungs.
The innovative procedure was performed in spring 2023 by a team at Northwestern University and was reported in a case study in Med. The patient, a 33-year-old man, developed life-threatening complications after contracting the flu. His clinical condition deteriorated rapidly, progressing to pneumonia, sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). According to thoracic surgeon Ankit Bharat, the infection was resistant to all available antibiotics and caused the lungs “liquefied”spreading the infection throughout the body.
Under normal circumstances, doctors would turn to life support systems to give damaged lungs time to recover. In this case, however, the lungs themselves were the source of the infection. THE removal of the lungs seemed necessary to save the man’s life, but doing so would almost certainly cause fatal heart failure. A bilateral pneumonectomy, meaning the removal of both lungs, severely disrupts blood flow to the heart.
To overcome this problem, the medical team developed a total artificial lung system (TAL) capable of oxygenating the blood and controlling circulation in the lungs. Unlike previous devices, the TAL included dual blood flow channels and a flow-adaptive shunt to stabilize circulation and protect the heart. The system kept the patient alive for 48 hours after removing both lungs, giving his body enough time to recover and tolerate a double lung transplant, explains the .
After removing the affected lungs, patient’s infection began to regress. Further molecular analysis confirmed that the lungs had been irreversibly damaged by ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) and would never have recovered on their own, making transplantation the only viable option.
Traditionally, lung transplants are reserved for chronic diseases such as cystic fibrosis or interstitial lung disease. Severe ARDS is usually treated with prolonged life support in the hope that lung function will return. This case challenges this assumption and suggests that transplantation can save lives even in acute situations.
Although the TAL system can currently only be built in highly specialized centers, Bharat hopes that its innovations will be integrated into standard devices.
