A group of surgeons in New York City have now successfully performed the first ever windpipe transplant. While one might be surprised to learn about the difficulty of this procedure, full windpipe transplants are one of the last significant challenges that have been eluding the medical community.
The windpipe, or trachea, is essentially a tube in the throat that transports air to the lungs. Though it may sound like recieving a trachea transplant would be comparably simple surgery, the trachea is actually an extremely complex organ system. The windpipe is lined with tiny hairlike filaments called cilia that serve to clear particles out of the lungs and it has a staggering interconnectedness to other organs.
Despite this complexity, the real challenge for transplant lay in figuring out how to maintain an appropriate blood flow to the organ during and after surgery. As it turns out, there were many misconceptions about how blood naturally flowed to the trachea. While the knowledge has been available since the 1800s, it was lost to the medical community for some time as the truth became buried under years of misinformation. It is widely believed that the confusion about the nature of the trachea's blood flow came about thanks to a research paper published in the mid-1960s by an influential scientist at Harvard.
Thankfully, the truth was rediscovered by Dr. Eric Genden, a surgeon at Mount Sinai and researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine. Dr. Genden's first attempt at putting his discovery into practice was the successful windpipe transplant of Sonia Sein this year.
Sonia Sein, a 56-year-old Bronx, New York native and former social worker, was never one to take no for an answer. After her trachea was damaged from being intubated for too long for an asthma attack, Sonia Sein endured years of unsuccessful surgeries and lengthy recoveries. Finally impatient with years of few results, Sonia began researching and contacting doctors herself. After learning that doctors at Mount Sinai hospital in New York City were working on trachea transplant research, she pursued surgery there. She says she called them every other day, "and I kept calling back until somebody called me back and gave me an appointment, I think they got tired of me calling!"
Sonia Sein became the first ever successful trachea transplant recipient in January, 2021 after an 18 hour surgery. Though it will take a while to know whether the operation was fully successful, Sonia is currently tolerating the transplant and is showing signs of healing.
While this kind of transplant may not become routine in the near future due to its complexity and traumatic nature, trachea transplants may give hope to those in dire situations - including COVID-19 patients who suffered damage to their windpipes after being on ventilators. In the DMV area alone, there have been at least 1,132,800 new cases of COVID-19 reported since Feb. 29. This means that the need for this kind of treatment could continue to grow -- even in our local community. While this first successful transplant was in New York, this advancement will continue to be shared amongst the medical community to help even more patients. As an increasing number of people successfully receive this surgery from now on, we will have even more to be hopeful about in the future.