A drone carried out test flights in Antwerp, in eastern Belgium, to transport human tissues from one hospital to another, an unprecedented experience in Europe that could be used in operations in the near future.
The device, piloted by the Flemish company Helicus, took off on Tuesday from a building of the ZNA hospital network and landed four minutes later on the roof of the Sint-Agustinus building of the GZA hospitals, 800 meters away.
Inside a tube attached to the drone was a bottle with potentially carcinogenic human tissue that had to be analyzed in the laboratory of the second center.
The test flight, followed by three others throughout the day, is a first on European soil. For now, Helicus is the only EU company that has received authorization from Brussels to fly drones for medical purposes over a city and pilot them remotely, out of the operator’s field of vision.
Helicus is committed to its commercial development and to making regular flights from 2024. “The great advantage of drones is that they combine speed, reducing the average transport time, and regularity, because they guarantee logistical reliability,” Mikael explains to AFP. Shamim, president of Helicus.
The leaders of the ZNA and GZA hospital groups are preparing for the approval of a European regulation, expected in 2023, to generalize this means of transporting human tissues. “Delivery times are vital and the absence of traffic in the air ensures a reliable flight duration,” says Els van Doesburg, president of ZNA, noting that journey times could be cut in half.
The four laboratories of the two hospital networks take 1,200 tests every year during medical operations that must be urgently analyzed to detect cancer cells and thus determine how the intervention continues. “The results must be ready in 30 minutes” at the most, specifies the pathologist of the GZA hospitals, Sabine Declercq.
For now, only transporting samples for analysis is on the table, but Helicus is already considering the possibility of transporting blood and even organs for transplantation. That will take years, though: With more volume, cooling elements would have to be added to the device, Shamim says.
