American doctors announced on Thursday (24/3) that they managed to do double lung transplant in a patient with end-stage cancera pioneering operation that raises hopes for other diseases at an advanced stage.
The patient, 54-year-old Albert Hurry, was not a smoker. He had to stay at the operating table for seven hours to receive his new lungs, at Northwestern Medicine Hospital in Chicago on September 25, 2021.
Six months later, his lungs are working well and no trace of cancer cells has been found in his body.
“Lung transplants are extremely rare when it comes to cancer, with very few recorded”, explained thoracic surgeon Ankit Barat in his announcement. “For patients in stage 4, 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.”
Surgeons are generally wary of such transplants because the risk of recurrence is very high if even a few cancer cells remain in a patient’s body, who will be required to take lifelong immunosuppressive drugs to avoid transplant rejection. The first few attempts failed, but doctors now know more about how the cancer has spread.
Albert Hurry’s symptoms 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.
Examinations revealed that he was suffering from stage I 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.
His doctors had already announced that he would die when his sister informed him of the possibility of having a lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine, a pioneering hospital in this field.. By 2020, a team led by Ankit Barat had already performed a double transplant on a young woman whose lungs had been 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.
It took doctors six hours to clear “billions” of cancer cells from his lungs, taking care not to 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.
Following this success, Ankit Barat’s team undertook to develop 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.
Source: News Beast
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