A COVID-19 patient earlier this year received a double-lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine from a donor who previously had the coronavirus, hospital officials announced Friday.
The successful transplant demonstrates that organs can still be viable if they come from an individual who recovered from COVID-19, doctors said. This is important because the demand for organs outpaces the supply.
“To date, 30 million Americans have had COVID-19 and many of them are registered organ donors,” Dr. Ankit Bharat, surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program, said in a news release. “If we say ‘no’ to them just because they had COVID-19 in the past, we will drastically reduce the donor pool and there’s already a big supply and demand gap.”
Surgeons still take precautions, such as performing a biopsy in the operating room, before transplanting the lungs in this still-rare “COVID to COVID” scenario, health officials said.
The transplant recipient is an Illinois man in his 60s who was diagnosed with COVID-19 in May and suffered permanent lung damage. The transplant was done in February. The donor’s death was unrelated to coronavirus, health system officials said.
Related
Since the start of the pandemic, Northwestern Medicine surgeons have done 14 double-lung transplants on COVID-19 patients — the most of any hospital in the world. The patients are expected to make full recoveries.
LISTEN NOW on the RADIO.COM App
Follow RADIO.COM
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram