SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Drones Fly Lifesaving Drugs and Organs to Patients
Healthcare providers hope it will allow them to deliver medications and other supplies faster and cheaper.
BY WILLIAM BOSTON I
f you need a prescription filled in the coming years, don’t be surprised if it flies in and lands in your backyard. Hospitals and doctors are
increasingly experimenting with the use of drones to deliver medications, lab tests, and supplies to patients being treated at home. Some are testing whether drones
can be used to deliver organs for transplant more quickly and cheaply. And in some cities, a 911 call
today could set off a drone carrying a defibrillator, tourniquet, or Narcan spray to the scene of an emergency ahead of the arrival of paramedics. The first attempts to use drones
to deliver things to people started more than a decade ago. Such efforts, however, were limited in part by Federal Aviation Administration regulations that require drones to fly within the line of sight of the operator — unless the operator had an exemption. But the adoption of drones to
deliver everything from pizza to penicillin is accelerating, thanks to evolving drone technology, growing
76 NEWSMAX MAXLIFE | MAY 2025
public acceptance of drones, and progress toward developing a set of rules for drone flights that would enable broader use. “One of the challenges in this
space five to 10 years ago was that there wasn’t a really clear regulatory framework. Over the last 18 months this has solidified, especially in the U.S. There is now a clear path to scale,” says Adam Woodworth, chief executive officer of Wing, the drone-service unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet.
TRANSPORTING ORGANS A 2024 study from consulting firm PwC estimates the global value of goods delivered by drones could grow to more than $65 billion over the next decade from about $251 million last year, with benefits expected in the healthcare industry.
The first attempts to use drones to deliver things to people started more than a decade ago.
Some doctors are betting that
drones can be used to help speed up and reduce the costs of delivering sensitive medical items such as fragile lab samples and organs for transplant, which can become less viable if they are held up in traffic or by airline-flight delays and don’t arrive in a timely manner. Dr. Joseph Scalea, a professor and
vice chair of surgery and director of innovation at the Medical University of South Carolina, is aiming to conduct a large clinical trial in 2026 to study the safety and efficacy of using organ-carrying drones at commercial scale. Scalea in 2019 oversaw the drone
delivery of a kidney for transplant in a project at the University of Maryland Medical Center. He and his partners then created
a technology platform to connect surgeons, hospitals, and organs, and to provide a way to track and monitor the health of organs in real time during transport — infrastructure that he says is needed if organ-carrying drones are to become an integral part of a large-scale system. “Having greater visibility of not
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