Northwestern surgeons have successfully performed a combined lung and liver transplant on a patient with advanced lung cancer. This is a first for the hospital, and possibly a first in the United States.
Dr. Gary Gibbon received a new set of lungs and liver at Northwestern Medicine in September after sustaining severe damage to two organs, his lungs and liver, during treatment for stage 3 lung cancer.
“It is an honor to sit here next to two distinguished surgeons who saved my life by performing a double lung and liver transplant when it was determined that there were no other options,” Gibbon said. told reporters Thursday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I talk and laugh with the doctors.
The gibbon can now breathe on its own and on Wednesday celebrated its 69th birthday and being six months cancer-free.
“I’ve been a doctor for decades, and we tend to be conservative at times with our treatment plans, which is why the sheer amount of science that’s gone into this treatment is so awe-inspiring. ,” Gibbon said.
Typically, patients in pre-transplant gibbon status would enter hospice care near the end of their lives, doctors said Thursday.
Gibbon, a pulmonologist in Santa Monica, Calif., underwent chemotherapy, radiation therapy and immunotherapy at a California hospital last year after her diagnosis. He ended up in intensive care and learned that the immunotherapy had permanently destroyed his lungs and irreversibly damaged his liver.
“As a pulmonologist, I never imagined I would need a lung transplant, much less for lung cancer,” Gibbon said. Pulmonology is a medical specialty that focuses on the respiratory system.
The first-of-its-kind program at Northwestern University is the gibbons’ only chance for survival. He came to Chicago in September to receive new lungs and a liver from the same donor.
The program, called Dual Lung Replacement and Multidisciplinary Treatment (DREAM), was established at Northwestern University to help patients with advanced lung cancer who are not responding to conventional treatments.
“As far as we know, this is the first case in the country where a patient with advanced lung cancer has successfully undergone a combined lung and liver transplant,” said Dr. Ankit Bharat, head of the thoracic surgery department who performed the lung transplant on the gibbon. Director of Northwestern Medicine’s Chest Research Institute.
“The doctors in California did everything they could, but I knew this was the only place in the country that would give us a fighting chance. And after speaking with Dr. Bharat, I knew the light was on. “I could see it,” Gibbon said. End of the tunnel. ”
Gibbon, a native of Cape Town, South Africa, worked in a private practice in Santa Monica for 33 years until his recent hospitalization. Last March, the gibbon started coughing and she started losing weight. Later, her chest X-ray confirmed that she had a cancerous mass in her lung.
After extensive and aggressive cancer treatment, Gibbon was admitted to the ICU at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center last July after suffering septic shock, pneumonia and multiple organ failure.
He was flown to Chicago on September 10 and spent 12 days in an ICU bed at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on the transplant list. Shortly before midnight on September 26, the gibbon lost its lungs. He received a new liver in the early morning hours of September 27th.
“this [double transplant] It was just off the charts and had never been done before. But most importantly, we were confident we could do it,” said Dr. Satish Nadig, the transplant surgeon who performed the gibbon’s liver transplant and director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center. Told.
Bharat and Nadig spent 10 hours working together on this procedure. Although the cancerous lung was the first to be replaced, the gibbon’s new liver was kept alive outside the body for 17 hours in a “liver in a box,” also known as liver perfusion. The box also pumped warm blood to the organ, allowing doctors to see if the liver was suitable for transplant.
Canning Thoracic Institute has performed more than 30 lung transplants under the DREAM program, including several patients with stage 4 lung cancer and one patient whose cancer has spread to the lung from another organ. included.
