Artificial Lungs Save Dying Patient's Life in 2 Days

When a 33-year-old man's heart stopped beating at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in 2023, surgeon Ankit Bharat faced an impossible choice. The patient desperately needed new lungs, but he was too sick to survive the transplant surgery itself.

The young man had contracted influenza that spiraled into a deadly secondary infection. His lungs filled with fluid and pus, his kidneys were failing, and his heart barely functioned. After doctors revived him, they knew they had minutes, not hours, to find a solution.

Bharat came up with a radical plan. His team would build artificial lungs that could completely bypass the patient's dying organs. The system would pump blood from the right side of the heart to the left, oxygenate it, and send it throughout the body.

Think of it like adding a bridge to a highway, Bharat explains. Blood normally travels from the right heart to the lungs, then to the left heart and out to the body. Without working lungs, that highway hits a dead end. His artificial system literally bridged the gap.

The innovation included a crucial extra feature. To prevent blood from backing up and causing a "traffic jam," the team built an exit road that let blood return to the right side of the heart. No system exactly like this had been attempted before.

The artificial lungs worked. For two days, they kept the patient alive while his body began healing from the infection. "It was almost like a curse or something that just got lifted," Bharat says. "And suddenly everything started to heal."

Within hours of being added to the transplant list, donor lungs became available. The team performed the surgery successfully. After several weeks of recovery, the man walked out of the hospital.

The Ripple Effect

Bharat published every detail of his technique in the medical journal Med so other hospitals can replicate it. Nothing about the system is proprietary or secret. He calls it a "nuclear option" for saving critically ill patients who have run out of alternatives.

Matthew Hartwig, a surgery professor at Duke University, calls Bharat's method a novel approach to a problem every transplant surgeon faces. The technique could give dying patients precious time to heal enough for life-saving surgery.

More than two years after his near-death experience, the patient is doing great. And Bharat hopes his story will be just the first of many. "Even at the end of the day, if we save one extra life, we'll be happy with that," he says.