They developed a novel artificial lung system to replace the patient’s severely diseased lungs for two straight days—long enough to ensure a successful double lung transplant. These include extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machines that can sub in for both the heart and lungs at once. His only hope for recovery was a double lung transplant. The doctors made the decision to entirely remove the man’s lungs and to engineer a temporary system that could stabilize him until a transplant was medically viable. Two days after he was placed on TAL, the doctors performed a double lung transplantation, which went off without any serious hitch.