Lung transplant offers new hope for terminal lung cancer patients, study finds

David Peterson wasn't a smoker, so lung cancer wasn't on his radar in 2019 when a cough that wouldn't go away sent him to the doctor. "It turned out I had stage 3 lung cancer," Peterson said. Doctors removed the tumor, but about a year later the cancer came back, this time growing in both lungs. Peterson tried treatment after treatment, but nothing worked, and the cancer progressed to stage four. "Nothing was working," Peterson said. "I was completely out of options."

That's when Peterson found Northwestern Medicine's DREAM program. Thoracic surgeon Dr. Ankit Bharat said doctors have long believed terminal lung cancer patients shouldn't get lung transplants, so he and his team studied what happens when they do anyway. "It really is designed to serve as the last option when everything else has failed," Bharat said.

Researchers looked at 98 stage four lung cancer patients who met specific criteria. Of those, 17 underwent a double lung transplant, while the other 81 received medical treatment alone because a transplant wasn't an option for them. Every single one of the transplant patients, 100%, was still alive a year after surgery. Among the patients who only received medical treatment, just 41% survived that first year.

"It offers the possibility of hope to many, many hopeless patients," Bharat said.

Peterson had been told he had about two months left to live. Nearly three years after receiving two new lungs, he remains cancer-free with no signs his body is rejecting the organs. His message to others facing the same diagnosis: "Don't give up."