Kelsey Flake, a 39-year-old mother of five from Cedar Hills, Utah, who has never smoked, is undergoing a rare double-lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago after standard Stage 4 lung cancer treatments failed, according to KSL News and KUTV.
Diagnosis and Treatment History
According to her family and reporting by KUTV, Kelsey Flake was running a half marathon one year ago, but now requires full-time oxygen and retains only 41% lung capacity. Born with a rare genetic variant that predisposes her to lung damage and cancer—a trait shared by four of her six siblings—she was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer in 2024. She initially underwent chemotherapy, surgery, and immunotherapy, which yielded scans showing no evidence of active disease before the cancer returned in both lungs in January. Despite undergoing another round of aggressive treatment with her care team, the disease continued to progress, leaving her dependent on oxygen and unable to walk across a room unaided, her family stated.
The Northwestern Medicine DREAM Program
As conventional treatment options dwindled, the family found the Northwestern Medicine DREAM Program—short for Double Lung Transplant Registry Aimed for Lung-limited Malignancies—an observational study that provides double-lung transplantation to selected patients whose cancer remains confined to the lungs and no longer responds to other therapies, as reported by KUTV. Historically, patients with cancer have been excluded from lung transplantation due to fears that the malignancy would return or spread. Flake completed the evaluation process and traveled to Chicago, where insurance approval delays shifted her first-stage surgery to Thursday, according to her family. During this initial procedure, surgeons are expected to remove at least one of her lungs before she is officially listed for donor lungs while kept in a medically induced coma.
Clinical Context and Survival Data
This surgical approach marks a significant shift in managing advanced lung cancer for highly selected patients. Data from KUTV indicate that 98 patients with medically refractory, lung-limited Stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer were evaluated in a research paper from Northwestern Medicine released on July 8 in JAMA. Of those patients, 17 received lung transplants, while 81 who met medical eligibility criteria but faced nonbiological barriers continued with standard medical treatment. Investigators observed that the 17 transplant recipients achieved an estimated one-year overall survival rate of 100%, contrasting with 40.8% for patients treated through medical management alone, though the study authors emphasized that further follow-up over a longer duration and evaluations of quality of life are still required.
