The created system effectively saturates the blood with oxygen and maintains circulation through the heart.
Surgeons removed the patient's damaged lungs and used artificial lungs to sustain his life for 48 hours until the transplant.
The team of doctors developed a system consisting of shunts, tubes, and pumps that mimics the function of the lungs, saturating the blood with oxygen and maintaining circulation. This was reported by Ankit Bharat, head of the thoracic surgery department at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, in the journal Med on January 29. This discovery confirms that artificial lungs can sustain a patient's life until a donor organ is available.
In 2023, a 33-year-old man from St. Louis contracted influenza B, which led to the destruction of his lungs. After being hospitalized, he faced a secondary infection caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which spread into his bloodstream. This dual infection, combined with an excessive immune response, led to lung failure.
"The patient's condition was dire," Bharat says. "He was on the brink of life and death."
Molecular analyses confirmed that the patient's lungs could not recover. Bharat and his colleagues, who specialize in lung transplants for patients with COVID-19 and other infections, realized that the man could not receive a new organ while being affected by the bacteria, and without lungs, he could not survive.
As a result, the doctors removed the damaged lungs and connected the man to an artificial lung designed by their team. This system takes blood from the right side of the heart, passes it through a pump to enrich it with oxygen and remove carbon dioxide, and then returns it to the left side of the heart for further pumping throughout the body. This solution ensured normal heart function and oxygen saturation of the blood.
The artificial lung system developed by researchers at Northwestern University became the first to be applied to a human in 2023. One of the videos shows the normal functioning of the patient's heart with the support of the artificial lung. Click the play button to see it.
Bharat's team developed a special circulation loop that not only saturated the blood with oxygen, like traditional ECMO, but also mimicked the hemodynamics of real lungs, helping to avoid overload of the right ventricle of the heart—one of the common causes of fatal outcomes in such situations.
After the lungs were removed, a large void formed in the chest cavity, which could have led to the displacement of the heart and cessation of circulation. Therefore, the doctors used chest implants as a temporary support for the heart.
The doctors anticipated that treating the infection would take several weeks and were prepared to sustain the patient's life with the artificial lung for an extended period. However, once the lungs were removed, the infection began to resolve rapidly, specialists report.
After the infection was cleared, the man was placed on the transplant list. A donor organ became available almost immediately. To date, more than two years later, Bharat notes: "The patient is doing great. His heart and lungs are functioning normally."
