Thoracic surgeon at Northwestern Medicine, Ankit Bharat, MD talks about keeping a patient alive without lungs for a few days before an organ transplant..
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in 2023.
Can you talk about your patient Davey Baur?
Bharat: The patient had developed an infection of his lungs that could not be treated with any antibiotics because it was resistant to everything. That infection continued to progress in his body and the lungs were so heavily infected that they started to liquefy, and he had developed pass in both cavities. If you look at it on a screen, there is nothing left. They’re completely whited out and pus-filled on both sides. When we got a call from his hospital, we felt that maybe we could help him and it was very clear to me that he needed a double lung transplant, but it was also very clear that he would not survive that transplant. We had to quickly come up with a strategy to maintain his normal blood flow in the body and support his heart using artificial devices and artificial channels. We took him to the operating room soon after took both his lungs out and engineered a system that could be attached to his body and keep his blood flowing through the heart, keep his brain and other organs profuse, and still not have to give him the blood thinners. Within 24 hours after we took out the lungs his body started to get better. The infection had gone, and his body was able to clear the leftover within two to three days. He had completely recovered from that standpoint. When you have no lungs, you have to keep the heart right in the center. One of our plastic surgeons was very gracious and gave me a rapid-fire course on what the different types of breast implants are and what the shapes are. We picked out a couple of them that were more malleable, and we molded them to Davy’s chest and that’s how the idea came about. Davy had previously smoked and then he changed to vaping. We don’t have definitive ways of proving that vaping caused Davy’s condition, but we know for a fact that vaping causes a lot of lung injury. Hindsight is usually perfect, but when I look back on his history, perhaps vaping was one of the most important risk factors that pushed him in that direction. With this new approach that we’ve developed, many patients who get to the point of needing lung transplant, are too sick for transplant. But now we have a mechanism to potentially get them to transplant by taking their lungs out using this new approach and bridging them to transplant. I think this is going to open a lot of doors for many patients who have no other options.
END OF INTERVIEW
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