A man undergoing an organ transplant to treat his liver cancer ended up catching a different form of the disease and dying.
The unnamed patient, 69, from Arizona, had cirrhosis and received a liver transplant from a deceased donor in 2019.
The transplant surgery was successful, however, months later the man developed an aggressive and advanced form of cancer.
Further testing of the cells extracted from the biopsy revealed the cancer was ‘distinctly different’ from the disease the man had before undergoing the liver transplant.
Based on a slew of lab results, doctors determined the new cancer in the liver ‘originated from the donor.’ And while the man was eventually diagnosed with lung cancer, the tumors were, unexpectedly, confined solely to his new liver.
Cases of ‘transplanted’ cancer are extremely rare and there are no statistics on the subject – only a handful of sporadic cases have been documented in medical literature.
Doctors in the case report wrote: ‘To our knowledge, this is the only case in literature describing donor‐derived lung cancer in a liver graft without known malignancy in the donor.’
The patient had originally needed a liver transplant because he developed alcoholic cirrhosis – liver disease that causes scarring of the organ due to excessive drinking – and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a type of liver cancer.
But body scans did not show signs of cancer anywhere else in the body, doctors wrote in the patient’s case report published in The Oncologist and shared in the NIH’s National Library of Medicine.
