Japanese doctors perform the world’s first living donor lung transplant on a patient with Covid-19

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Kyoto University Hospital said the woman underwent an 11-hour operation on Wednesday by a 30-person medical team for a lung tissue transplant from her husband and son.

But the Kyoto hospital said the case was the first in which lung tissue was transplanted from living donors to a patient with Covid-19.

Dr. Hiroshi Date, a thoracic surgeon at the hospital that conducted the operation, said he gave hope to patients suffering from severe lung damage from Covid-19.

“We have shown that we now have a lung transplant option (from living donors),” he told a news conference Thursday.

The patient, identified only as a woman in the western Kansai region of Japan, contracted Covid-19 late last year and spent months on a life support device that functioned as an artificial lung, according to Kyoto University Hospital.

Covid-19 caused so much damage to his lungs that he was no longer functional and needed a lung transplant to survive.

The woman’s husband and son offered to donate parts of her lungs. Transplants from brain-dead donors are still rare in Japan, and living donors are considered a better option, according to the hospital.

The husband and son are in a stable condition, and the woman remains in intensive care. He is expected to be able to leave the hospital in about two months, according to the hospital.

In June last year, American surgeons performed a successful double lung transplant on a patient with Covid-19 – considered to be the first such operation on a coronavirus patient in the country.
Last month, American surgeons performed a double “Covid to Covid” lung transplant, using the lungs of a donor who recovered from Covid-19, only to die of another cause, for a 60-year-old patient whose lungs were damaged by the disease.
A study launched earlier this year of more than 1,700 patients treated in the Chinese city of Wuhan – the zero point of the pandemic – found that X-rays of seriously ill patients showed evidence of lung damage a few months after their infection.

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