Indian-origin doctor performs first double lung transplant on Covid-19 patient in US

Team Udayavani, Jun 13, 2020, 12:04 PM IST

Indian-origin doctor Ankit Bharat and his team performed a double-lung transplant on Covid-19 patient in the United States.

Dr Ankit Bharat is chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of Northwestern’s lung transplant programme and the surgery is believed to be the first of its kind since coronavirus pandemic began in America

The recipient is said to be a Hispanic woman in her 20s. She spent six weeks in the    Covid-19 ICU on a ventilator and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a life support machine that does the work of the heart and lungs

Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program, said, “ We are one of the first health systems to successfully perform a lung transplant on a patient recovering from Covid-19. We want other transplant centers to know that while the transplant procedure in these patients is quite technically challenging, it can be done safely, and it offers the terminally ill Covid-19 patients another option for survival”

Also, Before putting the patient on the transplant wait-list, she had to test negative for Covid-19

Earlier, In Austria surgeons performed the world’s first life-saving lung transplant of a Covid-19 survivor.