Doctors keep patient alive using ‘artificial lungs’ for two days

Novel artificial lungs could help keep people whose lungs no longer function alive long enough to get an organ transplant

Originally written by Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron for Scientific American on January 29, 2026


New lungs (left) that were transplanted into a patient after he was kept alive with artificial lungs are seen next to his old lungs (right). Northwestern Medicine

In 2023 thoracic surgeon Ankit Bharat was working at Northwestern Memorial Hospital when he was drafted to help a 33-year-old influenza patient who was on the verge of death. Bharat recalls that the man had developed a secondary infection from one of the “most dreaded bugs” in the hospital, Pseudomonas, and had been put on a ventilator. The patient’s lungs were filling with fluid and pus, his kidneys were failing, and his heart was “barely” working, Bharat says. “He was actively dying.”

Then the patient’s heart stopped. “We got him back—but it was very clear that we had to do something right away,” Bharat says.

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