Doctors at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago successfully performed a “first-of-its-kind” double-lung transplant on a cancer patient, giving her a chance at survival when she was told she had limited time left to live.
Before this groundbreaking surgery, Amanda “Mandy” Wilk of Minnesota had been battling Stage 4 colon cancer for over seven years, undergoing various radiation treatments and even a liver transplant.
The 42-year-old elementary school instruction specialist initially sought medical attention for what she believed was food poisoning in 2017, according to a press release from Northwestern Medicine.
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After her treatments and a liver transplant from her brother, she was hopeful. But six months later the cancer returned, this time in her lungs. She was given few options for survival.
“I traveled to almost every major health system across the country, and they all told me there was nothing more they could do,” said Wilk in a statement.
Then she learned about Northwestern’s DREAM program – which stands for Double Lung Replacement and Multidisciplinary Care.
“Our surgical team meticulously removed Mandy’s cancer-ridden lungs without allowing any cancerous cells to spill into her bloodstream, and then we transplanted new lungs,” said Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute. “Based on all the testing that’s available to us – CT scans, PET scans, and molecular analyses of circulating cancer DNA in Mandy’s blood – we don’t see any remaining signs of cancer in her body.”
Laura Brown/Northwestern Medicine
Bharat said they’re cautiously optimistic. But Wilk is ready for her third chance at life.
She was discharged from the hospital post-surgery on her birthday, June 10. For the first time since she was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, she was able to ring the cancer-free bell.
“Throughout my eight-year journey of battling cancer, the one thing I’ve always wanted to do was ‘ring the bell,’ signaling my completion of cancer treatment,” said Wilk. “Many doctors told me I’d never be able to ring it, so when my lung transplant social worker made it happen on my birthday, there was no greater feeling. I was finally able to celebrate being cancer-free.”
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in both men and women in the U.S. Experts said it can spread to other parts of the body before detection, including the lungs and the liver.
Colon cancer typically affects people over 50, but it is increasingly being found in younger patients – something that has stumped medical researchers, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
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Wilk was just 34 when she was first diagnosed and it had already metastasized.
Northwestern Medicine said it has performed over 40 successful lung transplants as part of the DREAM program, using medical lessons learned from COVID-19 lung transplantation.
“Unlike the conventional technique of sequential transplants, this innovative technique involves putting the patient on full heart and lung bypass, delicately taking both cancer-ridden lungs out at the same time along with the lymph nodes, washing the airways and the chest cavity to clear the cancer, and then transplanting new lungs,” explained Bharat. “These patients can have billions of cancer cells in the lungs, so we must be extremely meticulous to not let a single cell spill into the patient’s chest cavity or bloodstream. We believe this technique can help reduce the risk of recurrence.”
