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A German woman has a new lease on life after a novel approach to double-lung transplantation rid her of a deadly cancer.

Cornelia Tischmacher, an art dealer and historian from Berlin, was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer in early 2018, just eight months after giving birth to twins. 

The then-40-year-old, who didn’t smoke and considered herself healthy, had surgery and chemotherapy, but her cancer came back the next year.

The prognosis looked grim. Tischmacher’s lungs began to fail, and by June 2024, she could no longer breathe without an oxygen tank. 

She was preparing for the worst until she discovered a first-of-its-kind clinical trial in the United States for patients just like her.

“My feeling was like, ‘of course I want to try it… if this is the only option in the world,’” Tischmacher told Euronews Health.

“At the same time, I knew I had no idea how successful something like this can be”.

The DREAM (Double Lung Transplant Registry Aimed for Lung-Limited Malignancies) programme at Northwestern Medicine, a health system in Chicago, had developed a new way of doing double-lung transplants for patients with advanced cancers that were limited to the lungs.

The Northwestern surgery team believed there was a problem with the standard operation, where lungs are transplanted one at a time. That brief overlap in the body, they thought, was just long enough for cancer to spread between the diseased lung and the new one.

Their solution was simple in theory, but complicated to pull off: they would remove both cancer-ridden lungs at once, clean out the airways and the chest cavity, and then implant the fresh lungs.

“These patients can have billions of cancer cells in the lungs, so we must be extremely meticulous to not let a single cell spill into the patient’s chest cavity or bloodstream,” said Dr Ankit Bharat, who performed Tischmacher’s transplant and is chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern Medicine.

In December, Tischmacher flew to Chicago for the surgery. When she woke up, she could breathe again.

Nearly five months later, her health is continuing to improve, with no signs of cancer.

Without the procedure, Tischmacher said, “I would have died. It’s very clear”.

Her surgery is one of the latest examples of what could eventually become a more common approach for certain people with advanced cancers – namely those who only have disease in the lungs, have strong hearts and kidneys, and are out of other treatment options.

About 70 people have undergone this surgery since the DREAM programme launched three years ago, Bharat said. Only five have seen their cancers return.

“They have much more limited disease than what they had at the time of the transplant, and we are able to restart the [treatment] cycle with systemic therapies. It still dramatically extended their life,” Bharat told Euronews Health.

“To the best of our knowledge, we’re the only programme in the world that is offering this,” he added.

Tischmacher was the first patient from Germany to receive a lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine, though other patients have travelled from elsewhere in Europe as well as Asia, the Middle East, South America, and Canada, the health system said.

Lung transplants are not common. There were only 7,814 transplants done worldwide in 2023, according to a Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation (GODT) database.

Meanwhile in Germany, donor shortages and the strict prioritisation of patients with the greatest medical need and potential benefit can make lung transplants more difficult to access.

Tischmacher will stay in the US for one year to be near her medical team before returning to Germany. 

When her eight-year-old twins visited Chicago in April, they visited museums, saw the aquarium, and went mini-golfing, all things Tischmacher would have struggled to do before the surgery.

Her kids were relieved, Tischmacher said, by the absence of an oxygen tank.

“In all those years, I never had any luck,” Tischmacher said. Her health “was always just slowly going downhill. And that I got this huge break in the end is… too good to believe”.