The world's first pulmonary artery transplant, involving the removal of the entire left lung, was performed on a patient with a lung tumour infiltrating the pulmonary artery. This extraordinary procedure was carried out at the Thoracic Surgery Department at Sant'Andrea University Hospital in Rome. This hospital is part of the Sapienza University of Rome network and is a highly specialised facility in the Lazio Region.
The surgery took place on July 17, thanks to the intuition of two young thoracic surgeons, Cecilia Menna and Beatrice Trabalza Marinucci, and was performed by a team led by Erino Aangelo Rendina, director of Thoracic Surgery at Sant'Andrea Hospital and dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome.

Thanks to sophisticated anaesthesia techniques, extracorporeal circulation was established and the heart was stopped. The diseased pulmonary artery was removed in its entirety, along with the entire left lung and a portion of the trachea. Subsequently, the delicate phase of reconstruction of the trachea and airway began. Only at this point was it possible to proceed with the actual pulmonary artery transplant, which was replaced with a cryopreserved artery segment of approximately 5 cm, perfectly adaptable to the size of the patient's vessel.

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