In a landmark first, a drone successfully delivered a pair of lungs for medical transplant after covering a distance of 1.5km in Toronto, Canada.
The recipient was 63-year-old Alain Hodak, an engineer and now a fan of drones.
University Health Network and Unither Bioelectronique joined hands to achieve this feat. UHN called it a world first.
According to cbc.ca, the drone travelled the distance between Toronto Western Hospital and Toronto General Hospital. Both hospitals are part of UHN.
What makes this momentous is the drone’s six-minute journey that not only set a precedent when it comes to organ delivery but also gives us hope for the future.
For Hodak who was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis in 2019, things couldn’t have turned out better.
University Health Network via cbc.ca
“Having no air, I was on oxygen in industrial quantities of 25 litres a minute of oxygen, which is pretty much as you could put in. And now I’m able to breathe, and I’m almost sometimes surprised about breathing,” Hodak told CBC News.
In 2021, his condition reached a point where a lung transplant was his only hope. He was put on the waiting list and called it a “race against time.” Little did he know, the director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program at UHN, Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, was already working on making the delivery of organs by drones a reality.
Screengrab/cbc.ca
After 53 test flights and developing a navigation system with fewer hurdles, Keshavjee told his patients about the life-changing project.
It was a successful operation that not only gave Hodak a new lease of life but also allowed him to attend his daughter’s wedding.
For more from trending, click here.