A woman has become the second ever person to be cured of stage four terminal lung cancer, after a ground-breaking technique was used to save her.
Tannaz Ameli had a double lung transplant and is now cancer free - a year after the first patient Albert Khoury, received the novel surgery after all other treatments failed.
Mrs Ameli, 64, said: "I hope that all cancer patients can be as lucky as me and Albert were.
"Every day we wake up and we're thankful for it.
"We're so happy. I'm back. I did it. I made it."
Back in 2021 Mr Khoury who had stage 4 lung cancer approached the team at Northwestern Medicine in the United Stages when his chemotherapy failed.
Stage four cancer means the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, and although some treatments can slow down its progression, the prognosis is terminal.
Mr Khoury's condition worsened and he was in the intensive care unit
His oncologist Dr Young Chae realised a double lung transplant may be his only hope of survival.
On September 25, 2021, after two weeks on the transplant list, Khoury became the first person with lung cancer to have a successful double lung transplant.
One year later, Ms Ameli, who lived in Minnesota, was also diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.
She said that she tried chemotherapy, but just like for Mr Khoury, it wasn't successful.
Her husband had seen a video about Mr Khoury's procedure, she said, and he scheduled an appointment with a surgeon at Northwestern Medicine.
She received the second successful double lung transplant in July 2022.
Single lung transplants have been successfully performed since the 1980s, and now, more than 1,500 single lung transplants happen each year in the USA.
Lung transplants for lung cancer are high risk as the cancer cells can spread from the lung into the rest of the body during the procedure, making it more likely the cancer will come back,
Dr Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and director of Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute, said a patient needs both lungs replaced.
He said that if the first lung is transplanted while the other cancerous lung is still in the body, there's a risk of the cancer spreading from that lung to the rest of the body.
Northwestern Medicine's surgery team's approach allowed surgeons to remove the cancerous lung from the body while the patient is hooked up to a bypass machine, which diverts their blood away from the heart and lungs.
They believe that if blood doesn't flow through the cancer during the surgery, the risk of the cancer spreading is less.
Dr Bharat said: "We feel quite confident that we'll be able to help some patients with no other options.
"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 blood stream."
Because of those first two successes, Northwestern Medicine is launching a first-of-its-kind clinical program for people with end-stage lung disease.
The program plans to follow the outcomes of its first 75 patients who receive double lung transplants for lung cancer in a new research registry called DREAM (Double Lung Transplant Registry Aimed for Lung-limited Malignancies).
Researchers hope to use the data to follow overall survival, disease-free survival and transplant rejection rates.
