Woman recovering after rare windpipe transplant from donor

NEW YORK (AP) — Sonia Sein said she spent the last six years “trying to catch every breath at every moment" after extensive treatment for her severe asthma damaged her windpipe.

She is breathing freely again after getting an unusual transplant. In January, doctors at New York's Mount Sinai replaced her trachea, the tube that ferries air from the mouth to the lungs.

Doctors say this drastic operation could potentially help other people including COVID-19 patients left with serious windpipe damage from breathing machines.

“We’ve talked for 100 years about just putting in a new windpipe,” said University of Washington surgeon Dr. Albert Merati, who had no role in the recent transplant.

But hooking up a trachea from a donor to a recipient's blood supply is challenging and would only be considered as a last resort, experts say.

“It is just technically extremely difficult," said Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer for the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, which oversees the nation’s transplant system. “It’s been a very difficult thing to crack.”

Experts say it’s too soon to deem Sein's transplant a total success — which UNOS said is the first of its kind in the U.S. Sein has to take powerful drugs to prevent organ rejection, but doctors hope to try to wean her off in a few years. Less than three months after the operation, there haven't been complications or signs of rejection.

“If it was going to be a failure, we would know by now. It’s quite promising,” said Dr. Alec Patterson, a transplant surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the operation. "It’s a major step forward.”

Sein's ordeal started in 2014 when doctors put a tube in her throat to help her breathe during a severe asthma attack. It...