Artificial Lungs Kept a Dying Man Alive For 48 Hours—Until He Was Well Enough to Receive an Organ Transplant
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In the spring of 2023, the patient arrived at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago on death’s door. His life was threatened by a condition that causes fluid to leak into the lungs—making it difficult for them to absorb oxygen—triggered by a flu virus and further complicated by a pneumonia-causing bacterial infection. His lungs were turning into liquid.
“He was not getting better,” study co-author Ankit Bharat, a thoracic surgeon at the hospital and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, tells Tina Hesman Saey at Science News. “He was actively dying.” The patient’s kidneys started to shut down, and his heart stopped. Bharat and his colleagues performed CPR, “but it was very clear that we had to do something right away,” he says to Jackie Flynn Mogensen at Scientific American.
The doctors faced a dilemma: The patient’s lungs were fueling the infection, but he was too sick to undergo a transplant operation. So, they removed his lungs—and replaced them with an artificial system, which was described in a case report published January 30 in the journal Med.
The device pulled blood from the right side of the patient’s heart, infused it with oxygen and pumped it back to the left side to circulate the vital liquid through the rest of his body. Bharat and his colleagues had been working on the system to help critically ill Covid-19 patients.
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Interesting. ECMO has been around for a while, I know people who were kept alive by it waiting for transplant. This seems to be a new version of it. I need to learn more.
ECMO reminds me of Rumsfeld’s brilliant observation “if a problem seems like it has no solution, enlarge the problem’.
Is the problem that the lungs failed and there are no new lungs to give the patient right now? Nope, enlarge it. The problem is we can’t get oxygen into the patient’s blood and carbon dioxide removed from it. Ok, that maybe we can solve.
