With COVID-19 continuing to wreak havoc on the lungs of its victims, Northwestern Medicine is doubling down on its efforts to be a national leader in lung care with the launch of a new institute dedicated to the field. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

       With COVID-19 continuing to wreak havoc on the lungs of its victims, Northwestern Medicine is doubling down on its efforts to be a national leader in lung care with the launch of a new institute dedicated to the field.

       Northwestern announced the opening of its new Canning Thoracic Institute on Thursday — named for John and Rita Canning, who donated $20 million to get the institute off the ground. John Canning is the chairman and founder of private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners.

       With the new program, Northwestern hopes to be able to recruit top talent in lung and respiratory care, develop new procedures, continue making advances with machine learning and artificial intelligence, and attract more patients from across the country.

       Northwestern Memorial was the first hospital in the country, last year, to successfully perform a double lung transplant on a COVID-19 patient. Since then, Northwestern has performed the procedure more than 30 additional times, the most of any hospital in the country, said Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern and executive director of the institute.

       The institute “will allow us to bring all those resources in one place,” Bharat said. “This helps us get to the next level.” Northwestern already has a number of other institutes that specialize in other types of care, such as the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute and the Lou and Jean Malnati Brain Tumor Institute.

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       Even before COVID-19, Northwestern had been planning to open a thoracic institute. Once COVID-19 hit, the need for it became more urgent, Bharat said.

       Before the pandemic, Northwestern had been performing about 40 or 50 lung transplants a year. Now, it’s on track to do more than 80 a year, he said.

       “COVID really enhanced the need for getting this to the finish line,” Bharat said of the institute. “COVID just highlighted the importance of innovation in that area.”

       He expects that demand for lung transplants because of COVID-19 will remain high for some time, even as more people get vaccinated. People with mild or moderate cases of the disease also seem to sometimes sustain lung damage that may eventually require a transplant, he said.

       Also, more people may now be able to get lung transplants than in the past, he said. The fact that lung transplants are now possible for COVID-19 patients who develop acute respiratory distress syndrome also means that they are possible for people who develop the syndrome for reasons other than COVID-19, he said. Before the pandemic, lung transplants were not considered a treatment for people with the syndrome, he said.

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       The institute will also serve patients who develop other types of thoracic issues — which are problems of the lung and chest, such as lung cancer, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

       Several patients who underwent double lung transplants because of COVID-19 emphasized, at a news conference Thursday, the importance of Northwestern expanding its work in lung health.

       Before he was transferred to Northwestern Memorial, doctors at a different hospital told Mustak Vohra to say his goodbyes to friends and family. Vohra fell ill with COVID-19 shortly after Thanksgiving last year.

       “They told me: ‘This is it. There’s nothing we can do,’” said Vohra, a Glenview pharmacist and father of four. When Vohra learned he was going to be transferred to Northwestern, he hoped it wouldn’t be the end after all.

       “I said to myself, ‘I’m not ready to meet my lord, so I begged God, while I was on the stretcher, while they were transferring me, I begged God, just give me one more chance,” Vohra said.

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       Vohra received a double lung transplant at Northwestern in March.

       Henry Garza, 55 of Sandwich, Ill., started feeling sick shortly before Thanksgiving last year. Within a few days of testing positive for COVID-19, he was admitted to Northwestern Medicine Valley West Hospital in Sandwich. He was eventually transferred to Northwestern Memorial downtown as his condition worsened.

       Ultimately, Garza — who had no significant health problems before getting COVID-19 — spent more than 100 days on a ventilator and on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a life support machine that replaces the function of the heart and lungs.

       “With COVID, because it moved so fast ... you really don’t have time to process a lot,” Garza, a married father of four, told the Tribune. “It’s just like bam, bam, bam, and before you know it, you’re on a ventilator, you’re on the ECMO machine, you have a tracheotomy. One minute, you’re like, ‘I feel decent.’ The next minute you have all these machines on you keeping you alive.”

       Garza received a double lung transplant in April. He was finally able to return home in June, where he continued undergoing physical, occupational and speech therapy, and slowly gained strength.

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       Recently, he was able to walk about two miles around Woodfield Mall with his wife Michele Garza — a major accomplishment considering the toll COVID-19 took on him.

       Garza said he will be forever grateful to the doctors, nurses and others who cared for him at Northwestern, and he hopes others who need such care will now be able to get it with the institute.

       “They’ll be able to offer services to more people and save more people,” Garza said. “They saved me, there’s no doubt about it.”

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