May 2025

PULMONARY

PATIENT TRAVELS FROM GERMANY FOR DOUBLE-LUNG TRANSPLANT TO TREAT LUNG CANCER

Featuring: Ankit Bharat, MD
Eight months after giving birth to twins, Cornelia Tischmacher of Berlin, Germany, had a case of pneumonia that wouldn’t go away. The then 40-year-old went to the doctor in January 2018, where tests showed she had stage 3 lung cancer.
 
In June 2018, Cornelia underwent surgery and chemotherapy, but by October 2019, it returned. Her care team told her palliative care with chemotherapy and immunotherapy was the only option to slow the cancer’s relentless progression.
 
By June 2024, Cornelia could no longer breathe without supplemental oxygen. That’s when she discovered the Northwestern Medicine DREAM Program, which offers double-lung transplants to eligible patients with advanced lung cancers confined to the lungs. Currently, Northwestern Medicine is one of the only known health systems in the world with a dedicated lung transplant program for patients with advanced cancers limited to the lungs.
 
Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of Thoracic Surgery and director of Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute performed Cornelia’s transplant. “A lung transplant was her only option to fix the lung failure, remove all the cancer cells from her body and give her a fighting chance to be there for her twins.”
 
Currently, Cornelia has no signs of cancer. She was the first patient from Germany to receive a lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine. Patients have also traveled from Asia, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, the Middle East and other European countries for a lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine.
 
Lung Cancer on the Rise in Young Women
Lung cancers are the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States; and clinicians have noticed a startling trend.
 
“On a daily basis, we’re seeing more young women being diagnosed with lung cancer,” says Dr. Bharat. “We’re seeing an explosion of lung cancer cases in patients who have never smoked or had limited smoking exposure — like Cornelia. The majority of them are young, and the majority are women.”
 
Canning Thoracic Institute has several research programs to better understand this trend. They also launched a lung cancer screening program for eligible patients, even if their insurance doesn’t provide financial support. The screening program’s goal is to share their findings with the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force.
 
About the DREAM Program
To date, Northwestern Medicine surgeons have performed more than 50 lung transplants for patients with advanced lung cancers.
 
Using lessons learned from pioneering COVID-19 lung transplantation in the U.S., they developed a novel surgical technique to clear the cancer during surgery while minimizing the risk of spread that has plagued earlier attempts at other hospitals.
 
“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 putting new lungs in,” says Dr. Bharat.
 
Since Northwestern Medicine’s Lung Transplant Program began in 2014, they’ve performed more than 600 lung transplant procedures for patients with end-stage lung diseases such as COVID-19, lung cancer, cystic fibrosis, COPD and more. In 2024, Northwestern Medicine had the shortest wait time for a lung transplant in the U.S. with a median wait time of four days. They also performed 148 lung transplants, the most performed at any transplant center in the U.S. in 2024.
 
For more information about the Lung Transplant Program or lung cancer screenings, visit nm.org.
Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of Thoracic Surgery in the Department of Surgery, Harold L. and Margaret N. Method Research Professor of Surgery, professor of Thoracic Surgery, professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care

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