American doctors announced today that they managed to do double lung transplant in one patient who suffered from cancer in the last stagea pioneering surgery which raises hopes for other diseases at an advanced stage.
The patient, 54-year-old Albert Hurry, was not a smoker. He had to stay seven hours at the operating table to receive his new lungs at Chicago Northwestern Medicine Hospital on September 25, 2021.
Six months later, his lungs are working well and no trace of cancer cells has been found in his body.
“The lung transplants they are extremely rare when it comes to cancer, with very few recorded “, explained the thoracic surgeon Ankit Barat in his announcement. “For patients in the 4th stage, lung transplantation is completely contraindicated. “But since Albert’s cancer was confined to his chest, we were confident that we could get rid of all the cancer cells during the operation and save his life.”
The surgeons they are generally wary of such transplants because they are too high risk of recurrence, if even a few cancer cells remain in the body of a patient, who will be obliged to take immunosuppressive drugs for life in order not to reject the transplant. The first few attempts failed, but doctors now know more about how the cancer has spread.
The symptoms by Albert Hurry appeared in early 2020: back pain, sneezing, chills, cough… The 54-year-old Chicago builder initially thought he was infected with Covid-19, but then started bleeding and then called his doctor.
From the examination was diagnosed with early stage cancer. “But because of Covid-19 I was not able to start treatment immediately,” he said. By July of that year, his cancer had progressed to second stage. And the chemotherapy did not work: it reached stage 3, then stage 4.
The doctors he had already been told he was going to die when his sister informed him of the possibility of having a lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine, a pioneering hospital in the field. In 2020 a team under Ankit Barat had already done double transplant in one young womanwhose lungs were destroyed by Covid-19.
Albert was deemed “eligible” for a transplant because his cancer, although in the last stage, had not metastasized to other organs.
The doctors needed it six hours to clear “billions” of cancer cells from his lungs, making sure they do not come into contact with his blood or other organs. “It was a night with a lot of heartbeats,” Barrat joked.
Albert Hurry can now live normally, work, play sports, without the need for breathing assistance.
“I have not smiled for over a year. “Now, I can not stop,” he said.
After success This, Ankit Barat’s team undertook to draw up new protocols to determine who else could benefit from such treatment. “We are now convinced that it is possible to have a transplant in case of a cancer. “I believe that this event will have more significant consequences than we can imagine now,” said the thoracic surgeon.
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