A federal judge yesterday sealed portions of a lawsuit that alleges the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and other parties should have known that the lungs they transplanted into a Newark, N.J., man were diseased.

Tony Grier, 43, was dying from a rare lung disease in 2005 when he received two donor lungs from a 31-year-old Lancaster woman who died in a car accident, according to court filings. Grier died six months later after undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer that was in the organs.

The plaintiffs' lawyers contend that the hospital should have known the lungs were cancerous because the donor had smoked for 16 years.

The suit was filed by Grier's mother in May 2007 in federal court in Newark and later transferred to Philadelphia. Yesterday, a judge here sealed portions that named the donor after she was mentioned in news reports.

Defendants in the suit are the University of Pennsylvania Health System, the hospital and surgeons who performed the transplant and evaluated the lungs, and Lancaster General Hospital, where they were harvested.

The suit alleges that the defendants failed to perform necessary tests that would have detected cancer, and also failed to find it after the transplant.

Penn denied the allegations. "We are vigorously defending this case," spokeswoman Susan Phillips said yesterday. "It has absolutely no merit. We had no reason to believe the lungs were anything but healthy organs."

An attorney for Grier could not be reached for comment. She told the Associated Press that she would not comment due to a court order.

There is no specific testing for lung cancer in donor organs, said Hossein Borghaei, an attending physician at Fox Chase Cancer Center, who was not involved with the case. It is difficult to diagnose lung cancer in living patients until the disease is advanced, he said, which is why the death rate is so high.

Howard M. Nathan, head of the Gift of Life Donor Program, which coordinates organ donations in eastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey and Delaware, said his organization is not now a party to the suit. The nonprofit had been named in an earlier complaint but was later removed.

"Our role at Gift of Life is to gather medical-information history and social history of the donor and report that to the transplant team," Nathan said. "They make the ultimate medical decision based on the particular donor information that we have gathered."

For donors without a cancer history, transplant teams rely on checks similar to those of a physical exam, including blood screening, chest X-rays and other tests.

Lung cancer is rare in a transplanted organ, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a national nonprofit that was established by Congress in 1984 to administer the nation's transplantation network.

Cancer, of any kind, was transmitted to 47 organ recipients between 1994 and 2006, data from UNOS show. Lung transplant recipients accounted for eight of those cases.

Organ procurement organizations, such as Gift of Life in Philadelphia, are responsible for gathering "known" conditions, including a wide range of cancers and other conditions that could be transmitted to the recipient.

"Medical conditions that should be screened for by history include the presence of malignancies, treated and untreated, or any other known condition that may be transmitted by the donor organ that may reasonably impact the candidate or recipient," UNOS' guidelines state.

The suit also alleges that antibiotics administered to Grier "served as a fertilizer" for the tumors in his lungs.

Borghaei, of Fox Chase, said yesterday that antibiotics have no known relationship to cancer development.