Medical Breakthroughs: Doctor receives rare double lung and liver transplant
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New innovations are allowing doctors to perform amazing operations, like transplants of major organs.
Pulmonologist, Allergist, and Immunologist Dr. Gary Gibbon has been helping patients breathe for more than three decades.
But then Dr. Gibbon found himself fighting for every breath.
Chemo, radiation and immunotherapy had little impact on his stage three lung cancer, and the treatments destroyed his liver.
"I had to do the Triple L, I call it. That's the double lung and liver," Gibbon said.
A team at Northwestern is the first to perform a transplantation of both lungs and the liver on a patient with advanced lung cancer.
"Dr. Gibbon is, to our knowledge, the first recipient of a multi-organ transplant done in the context of cancer," Northwestern Medicine Thoracic Surgeon Ankit Bharat said.
While the lungs were put in first, during the 10-hour surgery, the donor liver was kept alive outside the body by liver perfusion, where the liver is attached to a machine that pumps warm oxygenated and nutrient-enriched blood through the organ.
"When the time was right, we were able to take the organ off the pump and transplant it," Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center Director Satish Nadig said.
Now, Dr. Gibbon says he will take his experience as a patient to help his own patients.
"I plan to humanize it in a way that you can't get in any books," Gibbon said.
Although chemo, radiation and immunotherapy are the first lines of defense for lung cancer patients, only 25 percent respond to immunotherapy.
That's why Northwestern Medicine developed the first-of-its-kind double lung replacement and multidisciplinary care program, also known as DREAM, for select patients with advanced lung cancer that do not respond to conventional treatments.
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