Groundbreaking double lung transplant gives patients hope of becoming cancer-free

Lung cancer tops the list of cancer-related deaths in the United States, surpassing colon, breast and prostate cancer deaths combined.

For patients who have been diagnosed late, survival is slim. Now, a new groundbreaking double lung transplant is giving patients hope of becoming cancer-free.

Both Albert Khoury and Tannaz Ameli were diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer.

“They gave me, like, three months to live,” said Ameli.

The two were out of options and out of time, until Dr. Ankit Bharat, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Northwestern Medicine suggested a “Hail Mary.”

“In selected patients who have metastasis or cancer only located to the lung and they have failed all the conventional treatments, we think we can provide a new treatment for those patients,” said Bharat.

Traditionally, only one lung could be transplanted at a time. Now, Northwestern Medicine surgeons have performed the first two double lung transplants for cancer patients.

This new approach places the patient on a heart-lung bypass. Both cancer-filled lungs and lymph nodes are removed, the airways and the chest cavity are cleaned.

Surgeons have to be extremely careful not to let a single cell spill into the patient’s bloodstream or chest cavity. The two donor lungs are then transplanted.

Nearly two years after their transplants, both Tannaz and Albert are cancer-free.

Surgeons at Northwestern Medicine first performed double lung transplants on COVID-19 patients.

Post-transplant survival after a year was at 95%.

Note that the double lung transplant procedure is only for people who have lung cancer confined to the lungs. Surgeons plan to track 75 patients in a new research registry called Dream.