Imagine for a moment that you’re driving an ambulance through crowded city streets. You’re trying to save a patient’s life, delivering a lung transplant, but because of the amount of people and congestion in the area, you’re unable to step on the gas. Now, biopharmaceutical companies are looking to the skies to save lives.
Chinese drone company, EHang, known for being the first to place an autonomous drone on the market that’s capable of transporting a human, recently sealed a deal that will use drones to transfer donated organs to people in emergency situations.
Image source: EHang.
Pharmaceuticals and lung transplant tech company, Lung Biotechnology PBC, is acquiring up to 1,000 of EHang’s autonomous drones for its Manufactured Organ Transport Helicopter (MOTH) system. Lung Biotechnology will be using an advanced version of the Ehang 184 drone that was revealed at CES this past January.
The collaboration between the two companies will span up to 15 years, involving the drones executing pre-programmed flight plans to hospitals and recharging pads strategically located to ensure organs are delivered while still viable for transplantation.
“We anticipate delivering hundreds of organs a day, which means that the MOTH system will help save not only tens of thousands of lives but also many millions of gallons of aviation transport gasoline annually,” Lung Biotechnology Chairman and CEO, Martine Rothblatt said in a press release dispatched to Mashable .
Currently there is no date scheduled for when the first flights will take place, but as the partnership works towards regular service, medical drones could take to the skies before delivery drones become ubiquitous. If the effort between the two companies is a success, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that automated ambulance drones will be transporting humans for emergency hospital visits in the future.
No question about it, the era of autonomous drones is upon us.
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