KYOTO, April 9 – Kyoto University Hospital said Thursday it has performed the world’s first living donor lung transplant into a patient with lung damage from the novel coronavirus.
The COVID-19 patient, a woman from the Kansai western Japan region, is now in the intensive care unit, and her husband and son, who gave her parts of their lungs, are in stable conditions after the surgery, conducted on Wednesday, Jiji Press reported the hospital said.
Surgeries to transplant lungs from brain-dead donors to patients suffering lung damage related to the COVID-19 disease have been carried out in China, Europe and the United States, according to the hospital.
The woman became infected with the virus late last year. After her respiratory condition deteriorated while she was undergoing treatment at a different hospital in Kansai, the woman was placed on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, machine, it added.
Later, due to the aftereffects of novel coronavirus-induced pneumonia, both of her lungs became stiff and small, and almost non-functional.
The woman tested negative for the virus later, but she was alive only because of ECMO, and her recovery was seen as difficult unless she had a lung transplant.
According to report by Jiji Press, the woman was transferred to Kyoto University Hospital on Monday. In the surgery, carried out following a lung donation offer from her family, both of the woman’s lungs were removed, and part of her son’s right lung and part of her husband’s left lung were transplanted. The surgery took 10 hours and 57 minutes.
Since the surgery, the woman has been on a ventilator, but has come off ECMO. If things go smoothly, she will be able to leave hospital in two months and live normally a month after that, the hospital said.
According to professor Hiroshi Date at the hospital, who carried out the surgery, the woman’s lungs were fragile, and it was difficult to control the bleeding.
“In the sense that we now have a new option, I think this is a hopeful method of treatment for seriously ill patients (with coronavirus-induced pneumonia),” Date said.
Source: BERNAMA