First delivery of organ by drone for human transplant / Boing Boing

My late brother Mark was a transplant surgeon. He told me that he was sometimes woken up in the middle of the night to fly to a nearby town in order to recover, for example, a kidney, from someone who had just died (frequently in a motorcycle accident), then bring the organ on. a plane to another city where he would put the kidney in a waiting patient and then go home. (He felt it was important to personally recover the organ that he would later transplant.) I thought about this process by reading the first drone delivered to a kidney that had allowed a 40-year-old woman to be transplanted with success. had been on dialysis for 8 years. The drone delivery system was designed by researchers from the University of Maryland and donated to nonprofit organs of the Living Legacy Foundation of Maryland. The kidney only traveled three miles but was an important step forward. From the New York Times:

The team leader, Dr. Joseph R. Scalea, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine, said he was pursuing the project after constant frustration over organs that took too much time to reach his patients. Once the organs are removed from a donor, they become less and less healthy every second. He recalled a case in which an Alabama kidney took 29 hours to reach his hospital.

The drone used in this month's test had propellers and emergency engines, dual batteries and a parachute retrieval system, to protect against disasters if any of the components encountered a problem at 400 feet in the air. Two ground pilots monitored it with the help of a wireless network and were ready to override the automated flight plan in case of emergency. The drone also had built-in devices for measuring temperature, barometric pressure and vibration, among other indicators.

Mr Scalea described the theft as "proof of concept that this defective system can be innovated".

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