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Doctors at UZ Leuven have shown for the first time that a lung transplant with an organ donor who received Covid-19 is possible.
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More and more potential organ donors will have an infection with the coronavirus. That poses some important questions to science. Does Covid-19 irreversibly damage the lungs, making them unsuitable for transplantation? And what about the risk of the virus being passed on to the organ recipient?
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An organ donor is screened upon death, but a negative test does not rule out that remains of the virus are hiding deep in the lungs. These can trigger a new infection after a transplant. This can be fatal because a patient receives medication after the transplant to suppress the immune system and is more susceptible to infections.
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The lung transplant at UZ Leuven – in which the donor had undergone a mild form of Covid-19 – offers a first answer. ‘The transplant went smoothly and the recipient tested negative for the corona virus afterwards,’ says Laurens Ceulemans, lung transplant surgeon at UZ Leuven. ‘There were no complications and after a month the patient was able to leave the hospital in good health. Three months after the operation, the patient is doing very well: the lung function is excellent and the CT scan shows no lung abnormalities. ‘
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The description of the transplant was published in the renowned journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
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