California doctor with lung cancer receives first-of-its-kind lung-liver transplant
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Surgeons at Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute have performed what is believed to be the first-ever combined lung-liver transplant for a patient with advanced lung cancer, according to medical staff at Northwestern Medicine.
The 10-hour surgery took place last September; now 6 months after surgery, medical staff at Northwestern Memorial Hospital say that the patient still has no signs of cancer in his body and does not require additional treatment at this time.
“We all sort of knew that we rewrote the textbooks and medical history,” Satish N. Nadig, MD, PhD, transplant surgeon and director of Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center, who performed the liver transplant portion of the surgery, said during a press conference. “Teams from over 20 different specialties really made this happen.”
Gary Gibbon, MD, is a physician originally born in Cape Town, South Africa, who has specialized in pulmonology, allergy and immunology through his private practice based out of Santa Monica for the last 33 years. Gibbon is also an associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
Around March 2023, Gibbon began exhibiting excessive coughing and started to noticeably lose weight; it wasn’t long, until a chest X-ray would find a mass that would lead to a stage III lung cancer diagnosis.
Chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy treatment for the tumor at a California hospital would ultimately lead to Gibbon being admitted to the intensive care unit by mid-July. The immunotherapy used to treat his cancer both permanently destroyed his lungs while also causing irreparable damage to his liver.
After being recommended for palliative care or placement in hospice due to the organ damage, the physician-turned-patient remembered a TV interview his wife had shown him about the Double Lung Replacement and Multidisciplinary Care (DREAM) clinical program at Northwestern Medicine. The interview recounted a previous announcement about two patients who had received lung transplants and remained cancer free 1 year after surgery.
Gibbon made his doctors aware of the TV interview, and after a 4-hour medical flight to Chicago, he waited 12 days for his new organs from an ICU bed at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
He would receive his new lungs in the late nighttime hours on September 26 at the hands of Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery and director of Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute, before receiving his liver transplant during the early morning hours of September 27.
According to Nadig, the donor liver was kept alive outside of the body via new technology called liver perfusion, also known as “liver-in-a-box,” having been attached to a machine that pumps warm, oxygenated and nutrient-enriched blood through the organ, which allowed medical staff to assess its viability for transplantation during the lung portion of the procedure.
Thus far, the DREAM program has allowed for more than 30 lung transplants, including multiple patients previously diagnosed with terminal stage IV lung cancer.
The press conference held at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago celebrated Gibbons being cancer-free 6 months after the procedure.
Having celebrated his 69th birthday just a day before and with National Doctors’ Day being March 30, Gibbon expressed extreme gratitude for the two physicians who played instrumental roles in saving his life.
“The irony is not lost on me that as a pulmonologist, allergist and immunologist; it was shocking to receive a diagnosis of lung cancer,” Gibbon said. “Lung cancer is usually, unfortunately, detected at an advanced stage... and we can get into the benefits of lung cancer screening detecting caners at an earlier stage tend to be more treatable and successful in terms of outcomes, but the case for me was an advanced stage.”
Bharat said he and his team have learned valuable lessons over the last few years that have helped make surgeries such as the one performed on Gibbon possible.
“One of the, I guess I can use the word ‘silver linings,’ of COVID was the lessons we learned in taking care of those patients,” Bharat said. “On June 5, 2020, we performed the first double lung transplant for a COVID patient in the United States, and one of the important lessons we learned there was that we can take two lungs that have been extensively damaged from a virus and have been heavily infected from secondary bacteria, and we can do that safely in a critically ill patient without spilling those bacteria in the bloodstream and causing things to go south.”
Outcomes of patients through the DREAM program are being tracked in a research registry, according to a press release. Gibbon is expected to receive continued monitoring by his transplant team in Chicago throughout the summer.
Reference:
- California doctor receives Northwestern Medicine’s first combined lung-liver transplant for advanced lung cancer (press release). Available at: https://news.nm.org/california-doctor-receives-northwestern-medicines-first-combined-lung-liver-transplant-for-advanced-lung-cancer/. Published March 28, 2024. Accessed March 28, 2024.
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