Automatic Breathing

Artificial lungs kept a patient alive for two days before transplant

- Jackie Flynn Mogensen

X-rays show a patient's chest with lungs in place and then removed. An artificial system kept him alive for two days without any lungs.

IN 2023 THORACIC SURGEON Ankit Bharat was working at Northwestern Memorial Hospital when he was drafted to help a 33-year-old influenza patient who was on the verge of death.

Bharat recalls that the man had developed a secondary infection from one of the “most dreaded bugs” in the hospital, Pseudomonas, and had been put on a ventilator. The patient’s lungs were filling with fluid and pus, his kidneys were failing, and his heart was barely working, Bharat says. “He was actively dying.” Then the patient’s heart stopped. “We got him back—but it was very clear we had to do something right away,” Bharat says.