34th Annual Scientific Meeting proceedings

On one of the walls of a hospital in Barcelona, ​​a word is written, “Overcoming”. It is an important word for patients and family members who come to that hospital in difficult moments of their lives, in. Moments when they have to face an illness.

But it is also an important word for the workers of that hospital, it means “overcoming” the problems they encounter on a daily basis, overcoming fears and overcoming adversities. That word reminds them every day that they have to improve themselves.

Minimally invasive surgery revolutionized lung cancer surgery and there are countless scientific articles that support it. However, when we talk about minimally invasive surgery and lung transplantation, there is practically nothing in the scientific literature. Because no one has investigated why minimal invasion is not used in a surgery as aggressive as lung transplantation, taking into account that it is performed on the weakest patients.

The Vall d'Hebron Hospital in Barcelona has a very solid robotic surgery program for lung cancer and is also the most important lung transplant program in Spain. We knew that at some point those two lines would have to join together. And they were brought together through lung cancer surgery in which the procedure was very similar to a lung transplant.

The objective was to work to eliminate such aggressive surgery for such weak patients.

While the Barcelona team worked on their new project, a team from Los Angeles in the USA published that they had performed the “First Robotic Lung Transplant”. The Barcelona team wanted to know everything about that USA program and they met with them and showed them everything about their program. The LA team had not performed the entire transplant with robotic surgery, only part of it.

The Barcelona team wanted to perform the entire transplant with robotic surgery so they returned to the laboratory and performed experimental surgery on sheep at the Jesus Uson minimally invasive center in Cáceres where they performed two completely robotic lung transplants on sheep. In addition, they designed with an American company some instruments designed exclusively for robotic transplantation.

In February 2023, they performed the world's first fully robotic transplant on a 65-year-old patient with pulmonary fibrosis.

The impact of the news was worldwide and currently there are many teams interested in the Barcelona Robotic Lung Transplant technique.