A mysterious deadly infection that affects roughly 4 percent of all lung transplant recipients is treatable with antibiotics, a Northwestern Medicine physician and his team found in a recent study.
The infection is "rare but it's almost always fatal," said Ankit Bharat, MD, a thoracic surgeon and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine lung transplant team. "No one knew the cause or how to prevent it. This simply wasn't acceptable to me."
So Dr. Bharat spent months studying samples of the infection from Northwestern Medicine and elsewhere across the globe. He was able to identify one type of bacteria as the cause of the infection and demonstrated that it can be treated with antibiotics.
"Further studies need to be done, but this research has already saved other patients. Other centers who had patients with this infection have reached out to us and I know of two patients who have received because of antibiotics," he said.
The research was published in Science Translational Medicine.