Timothy Amukele (left) and

Robert Chalmers launch drone

Photo courtesy of

Johns Hopkins Medicine

Small drones can safely transport blood samples, according to a study published in PLOS ONE.

Investigators found that 40 minutes of travel on hobby-sized drones did not affect the results of common and routine blood tests.

The team said that’s promising news for people living in rural and economically impoverished areas that lack passable roads because drones can give healthcare workers quick access to lab tests needed for diagnoses and treatments.

“Biological samples can be very sensitive and fragile,” said study author Timothy Amukele, MD, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

That sensitivity makes even the pneumatic tube systems used by many hospitals, for example, unsuitable for transporting blood for certain purposes.

Of particular concern related to the use of drones, Dr Amukele noted, is the sudden acceleration that marks the launch of the vehicle and the jostling when the drone lands on its belly.

“Such movements could have destroyed blood cells or prompted blood to coagulate, and I thought all kinds of blood tests might be affected, but our study shows they weren’t . . . ,” he said.

For the study, which Dr Amukele believes is the first rigorous examination of the impact of drone transport on biological samples, his team collected 6 blood samples from each of 56 healthy adult volunteers at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The samples were then driven to a flight site an hour’s drive from the hospital on days when the temperature was in the 70s. There, half of the samples were packaged for flight, with a view to protecting them for the in-flight environment and preventing leakage.

Those samples were then loaded into a hand-launched, fixed-wing drone and flown around for periods of 6 to 38 minutes. Owing to Federal Aviation Administration rules, the flights were conducted in an unpopulated area, stayed below 100 meters (328 feet) and were in the line of sight of the certified pilot.

The other samples were driven back from the drone flight field to The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Core Laboratory, where they underwent the 33 most common laboratory tests that account for around 80% of all such tests done. A few of the tests performed were for sodium, glucose, and red blood cell count.

Comparing lab results of the flown versus nonflown blood samples, the investigators found that the flight did not have a significant impact.

Dr Amukele and his team noted that one blood test—the bicarbonate test—did yield different results for some of the flown versus nonflown samples. Dr Amukele said the team isn’t sure why, but the reason could be because the blood sat around for up to 8 hours before being tested.

There were no consistent differences between flown versus nonflown blood, he said, and it’s unknown whether the out-of-range results were due to the time lag or because of the drone transport.

“The ideal way to test that would be to fly the blood around immediately after drawing it, but neither the FAA nor Johns Hopkins would like drones flying around the hospital,” he said.

Given the successful results of this proof-of-concept study, Dr Amukele said the likely next step is a pilot study in a location in Africa where healthcare clinics are sometimes 60 or more miles away from labs.

“A drone could go 100 kilometers in 40 minutes,” he noted. “They’re less expensive than motorcycles and are not subject to traffic delays, and the technology already exists for the drone to be programmed to home to certain GPS coordinates, like a carrier pigeon.”

Drones have already been tested as carriers of medicines to clinics in remote areas, but whether and how drones will be used in flights over populated areas will depend on laws and regulations.

Drones can transport blood samples