Lung transplants extended survival in stage 4 cancer: study
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Northwestern Medicine reported in JAMA that 17 patients with stage 4 lung cancer confined to their lungs survived a full year after double lung transplants (through June 2025), compared to roughly 88% one-year survival among non-cancer transplant recipients and 74 cancer progressions among 81 similar patients on standard chemo, immunotherapy, or radiation.
- By January 2026, 4 of the 17 transplant recipients had experienced cancer recurrences and 2 had died from non-cancer causes (an infection and a blood clot), per the study.
- Study co-author Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern Medicine, said the protocol grew out of the team's 2020 first lung transplant in a Covid patient: lessons from removing virus-laden lungs were applied to lungs harboring treatment-resistant, contained cancer.
- Only about 300 cases of stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer that hasn't spread beyond the lungs occur per year in the United States — a small population the transplant approach could eventually reach.
- An accompanying JAMA editorial by Ece Cali Daylan and Ramaswamy Govindan of Washington University School of Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center warned the lung-transplant system is 'zero-sum,' and called for larger, randomized studies before broader adoption.
- Jodi Graf, a 61-year-old nonsmoker and NASA robotic software engineer who had lived with lung disease for decades, received her transplant just 24 hours after being added to the waitlist — far faster than typical — and told STAT she 'traded two' diseases for one manageable condition.
Why it matters: If confirmed in larger randomized trials, the Northwestern protocol could redirect organ-allocation policy for a narrow but desperate group — roughly 300 Americans a year with stage 4 lung cancer confined to their lungs — while intensifying the zero-sum debate over who gets scarce donor lungs. Bharat argues early outcomes in cancer patients trended better than in non-cancer recipients, but the JAMA editorialists insist the precedent must be replicated before transplant centers routinely accept these cases.
