People cannot survive without lungs. Yet one of Ankit Bharat’s patients did so for two full days.

In a study published in the Cell Press journal Med, surgeons detailed how they extracted a patient’s severely infected lungs and relied on a custom-built “artificial lungs” setup to sustain him until donor organs became available. The team describes the strategy as a potential bridge to transplantation for patients who would otherwise die waiting.

“He was critically ill. His heart stopped as soon as he arrived. We had to perform CPR,” recalls Bharat, the lead author and a thoracic surgeon at Northwestern University. “When the infection is so severe that the lungs are melting, they’re irrecoverably damaged. That’s when patients die.”