Six years ago, Rwanda had a blood delivery problem. More than 12 million people live in the small East African country, and like those in other nations, sometimes they get into car accidents. Anemic children need urgent transfusions. You can't predict these emergencies. And when they do, the red stuff stored in Place A has to find its way to a patient in Place B--fast.

This test shows progress for the team's first in New Jersey in 2016 (pictured) Johns Hopkins researchers set a new medical drone delivery record after successfully transporting human blood samples 161 miles. Among the two groups, the results for red blood cell, white blood cell, platelet counts, sodium levels, and other measures were all similar. 'We expect that in many cases, drone transport will be the quickest, safest, and most efficient option to deliver some biological samples to a laboratory from rural or urban settings,' said Timothy Amukele, assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the paper's senior author. Among the two groups, the results for red blood cell, white blood cell, platelet counts, sodium levels, and other measures were all similar.

A Zipline drone is launched in Rwanda. The company is now expanding to set up a national network in Tanzania. A Zipline drone is launched in Rwanda. The company is now expanding to set up a national network in Tanzania. Eight-year-old boy bitten by dog.

Delivering objects via drone is a tempting notion bound by hard constraints: drones are small, so the cargo has to be small. Drones need power to fly, and any additional weight requires more power to cover the same distance, which further limits the size of the cargo. For a drone delivery to make sense, then, the small cargo has to justify both its weight and the urgency of a drone flight. Pound for pound and ounce for ounce, few cargoes match that limitation better than blood. In a study published in the journal Transfusion, Johns Hopkins researcher Timothy Amukele demonstrated that drones are a safe and efficient way to get blood pouches to remote locations.

Timothy Amukele, an assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, and systems engineer Jeff Street are trying to figure out how to use drones to deliver blood samples. Timothy Amukele, an assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, and systems engineer Jeff Street are trying to figure out how to use drones to deliver blood samples. Three years ago, Geoff Baird bought a drone. A Seattle dad and hobby plane enthusiast, Baird used the 2.5-pound quadcopter to photograph the Hawaiian coastline and film his son's soccer and baseball games. But his big hope is that drones will soon fly tubes of blood and other specimens to Harborview Medical Center, where he works as a clinical pathologist running the hospital's chemistry and toxicology labs.

A drone successfully delivered medical supplies to the New Jersey coastline straight from the deck of a ship, marking the first ship-to-shore delivery in the US. The flight was designed to test whether drones could be used to carry human medical supplies to and from areas that cannot be access during major storms, earthquakes or other disasters. The test was run by disaster preparedness non-profit Field Innovation Team. Drone-firm Flirtey, which managed the first land-based drone delivery of medical supplies to a rural health clinic in July 2015, flew medical samples to Camp May in partnership with Dr Timothy Amukele, assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. While drones have already been muted as one way to deliver goods, such as Amazon's Air Prime drones, Amukele said that biological samples "are not like a shoe or a book, they are pretty fragile items".

A vial of blood is small, fragile, and vital. In the days and weeks following an earthquake, or in the early stages of an epidemic, a sample of blood, properly tested, can save lives. That of the patient and, if a disease is noticed and handled before it spreads, that of many others. Drones, from ship to shore and then shore back to ship, may be the answer. Later this month, drone delivery service Flirtey, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine pathologist Dr. Timothy Amukele, plans to test ship-to-shore drone delivery in Cape May, New Jersey, on June 23rd.