Surgeons at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago performed the first lung transplant on an American COVID-19 survivor using the lungs of another person known to have recovered from the disease.
According to the hospital, the recipient – a 60-year-old Illinois health worker – was placed on life support after being diagnosed with COVID in May. He was transferred to Northwest and spent a week on the transplant list before being linked to the donor, who recovered from the disease before dying from unrelated 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 Long Transplant Program, in a statement, noting that many of the 30 million Americans who had COVID-19 had an organ is donors.
“If we say no to them because they have had COVID-19 in the past, we will drastically reduce the donor pool, and there is already a huge demand and supply demand,” he said.
Surgeons have recently begun performing lung transplants on COVID patients, raising concerns that greater demand would lead to a shortage of available organs. The waiting list for lung transplants in the US hangs around 1,000, with a mortality rate of about 10 percent.
In January, Northwestern told The Daily Beast that they had received double the number of transplant requests 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 important to expand the donor pool to meet the increase in demand.
Last month, a woman from Michigan died after receiving the lungs of a donor whose body had the virus, despite the fact that it was initially negative, proving that transmission through organ donation could take place. Michael Ison, a specialist in infectious diseases and organ transplants in the North West, said many transplant centers donate organs unnecessarily for fear of a similar incident.
To prevent this from happening in this case, Northwestern doctors performed extensive tests to ensure that the donor’s lungs were completely removed from the virus, including a nasal swab and an examination of the donor’s lung fluid.
“If the swab and lung fluid are removed from the virus and the lung biopsy confirms that there is no permanent damage to the lungs, we can have confidence in the quality of the donor lungs,” Bharat said. “Our first ‘COVID to COVID’ patient had beautiful, healthy lungs and is still recovering at the optimal rate.”
Northwest has so far performed 14 lung transplants on COVID patients; the University of Florida has done more than 10. Doctors in Belgium successfully performed a lung transplant using the lungs of a woman who presumably had COVID-19 last year. They consider the recovery after 90 days after surgery to be excellent.