Baltimore: In a series of "groundbreaking first" the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore successfully delivered and transplanted a donor kidney into a patient using an unmanned drone to transport the donated organ.
On April 19 project leader Dr. Joseph Scalea and his team received a new kidney for a 44-year-old Baltimore woman who had undergone eight years of dialysis because of kidney failure.
Dr. Scalea said, "this is a first that has never been done for a human being."
The patient who received the kidney, Trina Glispy was discharged April 23.
"This is a complicated web of couriers and expensive charter flights which in my opinion could be avoided. We have technologies now that allow the unmanned transportation of really any payload. And what we've done is try to innovate those systems to allow our patients better access to higher quality transplantable organs," Scalea said.
The flight time of the organ took 9.52-minutes and pilots and medical staff were in radio contact, while maintaining a visual line of sight with the drone.
"Having a large scale drone carry a heavy payload of medical devices over the class bravo airspace. And now it's actually a transplant --a transplantable human organ," he said.
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Dr. Rolf Barth, a member of the surgery team, says understanding the potential impact of the health of the organ after using the drone to transport is important.
Barth says, "how an organ responds to a new way of transportation is unknown." He says it important to make sure that drone delivery of organs is as safe for the organ as all other modes of transport.
