CHICAGO, Ill. (Ivanhoe Newswire) – You’ve heard the saying, doctors make the worst patients? Well, one doctor found himself not only a patient, but the first patient in the world to undergo a procedure that saved his life.
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,” he 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.
Ankit Bharat, MD Thoracic Surgeon Northwestern Medicine said, “Doctor Gibbon is, to our knowledge, the first recipient of a multiorgan transplant done in the context of cancer.”
“They said, ‘Look this may not work out, you know? This is a high risk, you understand that?’ And I’m like, yeah, give me the consent form. I’m ready to go,” Dr. Gibbon recalled.
While the lungs were put in first, during the ten-hour surgery, the donor’s 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,” explained Satish Nadig, MD, Transplant Surgeon and Director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center.
And now a year later?
“We were able to help fix his lung failure, we fixed his liver failure, and we also potentially cured him of cancer,” said Dr. Bharat.
And 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,” he expressed.
Although chemo, radiation, and immunotherapy are the first lines of defense for lung cancer patients, only 25% 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 who do not respond to conventional treatments.
Contributors to this news report include: Marsha Lewis, Producer; Matt Goldschmidt, Videographer; Roque Correa, Editor.
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