As organ transplant science advances, its biggest hurdles are increasingly logistical ones—such as securing a flight and navigating through traffic fast enough to deliver an organ before it deteriorates. Enter the drone, for which researchers recently documented a milestone test in Science Robotics. After hundreds of practice flights, their drone carried a human donor lung on a five-minute journey from the roof of Toronto Western Hospital to Toronto General Hospital for a successful transplant. The trip can take 25 minutes by road. This study suggests that drone delivery “may have a unique opportunity for organs like hearts and lungs that can tolerate less time on ice,” says Joseph Scalea, a transplant surgeon now at Medical University of South Carolina, who was not involved in the study. In 2019 his team at the University of Maryland made a groundbreaking drone delivery of a kidney—an organ that can survive 24 hours if packed in ice. Lungs and hearts last for less than half that long.
The team enhanced the drone's connectivity so radio frequencies wouldn't interfere with its GPS and installed a parachute set to open automatically in case of midair malfunction.
Disponível em: https://www.nationalgeographic.com. Acesso em: 2 abr. 2023.
According to the text, what can be said about drones and transplants?
