A team of surgeons has performed the world’s first human trachea transplant. The surgery was performed on a woman with severe damage to the organ, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York revealed.
The recipient of the trachea transplant was Sonia Sein, a 56-year-old American woman suffering from asthma.
After a severe asthma attack several years ago, Sonia Sein had to undergo repeated intubations, meaning doctors inserted a tube into her airway through her mouth, causing severe damage to her trachea.
Several surgical attempts to reconstruct Sein’s trachea followed, but these caused even greater damage and the woman began breathing through a surgically created hole in her neck, which put her at an extremely high risk of suffocation or even death.
The 18-hour procedure was performed in January 2021. Now, Sein is recovering and the team announced the surgery as “the first successful tracheal transplant,” noting that the breakthrough could hold promise for people with a variety of conditions – even in patients who have been harmed while hospitalized by covid-19.
Speaking to NPR, Sein explains that he learned of a team of researchers at Mount Sinai working through the Tracheal Transplant Program, and approached the hospital about his condition. But the doctors were not yet ready to perform the risky operation.
Last year, surgeon Eric Genden decided it was time to try.
The trachea is a cartilaginous tube that carries air to and from the lungs, but the operation is far from simple. One of the biggest obstacles to the procedure is knowing how to transport blood to the trachea during and after the operation.
To overcome the challenges, surgeons used a new approach in which they connected blood vessels in the recipient’s oesophagus and thyroid gland to the donor’s trachea, providing vital blood flow.
The surgery allowed Sein to have his tracheostomy removed, breathing only through his mouth for the first time in six years.
