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A kidney arrives after taking off.
Screenshot of UMMC video by Leslie Katz / CNET
A Baltimore woman is now proud to have a unique kidney: it was the first organ to be delivered for transplant by drone, and successfully implanted.
The donated kidney, contained in a special cooler, was piloted by an eight-rotor custom drone from a location in West Baltimore, a few miles from the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC). There, he was implanted in a 44-year-old woman who had spent the previous eight years on dialysis.
"All this is incredible," said the patient, who did not reveal her name, in a statement. "Years ago, it was not something you could think of."
The flight, which lasted only about 10 minutes, was intended to demonstrate the customized unmanned air system. The UMMC teams had previously shown that an organ could be transported via a drone, but it seems that this is the first time a patient is implanted after a flight.
"We had to create a new system that was still part of the FAA's regulatory structure, but also able to support the extra weight of the organ, cameras, and systems for tracking, communicating and securing organs in a densely populated urban area, "said Matthew Scbadero, director of the UAS test site at the University of Maryland.
The project was led by Joseph Scalea, one of the surgeons who performed the transplant. He hopes UAS can help streamline the organ delivery system to patients who need it quickly.
"It's a complicated network of expensive couriers and charter flights, which, in my opinion, could be avoided."
According to Scalea, the use of drones to reduce the delivery time of organs by up to a few hours could mean that 2,500 additional organs would become viable for implantation.
According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which runs the organ transplantation system in the United States, nearly 114,000 people were on waiting lists for an organ transplant in 2018. Read More 36,000 transplants were performed in 2018 in the United States.
There is still a lot of research to be done to ensure that flying in the air in a box is a safe mode of transportation for all organs. Systems must also be put in place to manage this new category of critical deliveries. But eventually, the kidneys and other parts of the body could be flying through the air to save lives every day.
That is, as long as vultures and other birds of prey do not understand what's in these slow-flying containers.
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