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Drone Deliveries Of Blood Could Transform Healthcare In Africa

Tara Haelle
This article is more than 4 years old.


While those words have traditionally been the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service, they may apply just as well to the world's first drone delivery service operating at a national scale--in Rwanda. That only sounds like an odd place for such a service to take flight until you hear what these 22-lb. custom-built autonomous airplanes are delivering: blood.

In this east African country nearly the size of Maryland, an estimated 325 pregnant women per 100,000 die each year, often from postpartum hemorrhage. That's somewhere about around 15 times the rate in the U.S., according to the CDC and the WHO. Many of these deaths are preventable if the women receive blood in time for a life-saving transfusion. But that's a tall order in a country with inadequate infrastructure for delivering a product that has strict temperature requirements and spoils quickly.

Enter Zipline, a robotics company based in California that has just begun negotiating directly with African countries' governments to deliver medical supplies with drones. Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo has built "an instant delivery system for the world, allowing medicines and other products to be delivered on-demand and at low cost, anywhere," he explained.

About half of all the transfusions the company delivers will go to mothers suffering postpartum hemorrhage, and nearly a third will go to children suffering from severe anemia due to malaria infections.

"Nothing more precious than blood," Rinaudo said during a live demo via Periscope. "It directly saves lives, and it’s an incredible logistical challenge for the country."

I saw first-hand how desperately some countries in Africa need better infrastructure to get life-saving medical supplies, vaccines and medications to remote villages when I reported from Mozambique on maternal and infant health a little over a year ago. The infrastructure isn't much better in Rwanda, where roads are subject to the whims of the weather and power outages threaten temperature-sensitive supplies that can spoil easily.

"It can be a little bit hard to fully appreciate how hard it is to run an efficient supply chain and healthcare system where the roads wash out 90% of time in rainy season," Rinaudo said.

The start-up boasts investments from Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, SV Angel, Subtraction Capital, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Stanford University. Along with co-founders Will Hetzler and Keenan Wyrobek, Rinaudo spent two years building a team with former employees of SpaceX, Google, NASA and Boeing. They constructed a fleet of hardy electronic drones that can fly more than 75 miles round-trip on one battery charge--in pretty much any of weather conditions that a commercial airliner can fly through.

Starting in July, Zipline will be working directly with Rwanda's National Center for Blood Transfusion to make 50 to 150 deliveries a day of red blood cells, plasma or platelets to the 21 transfusion facilities in the western half of Rwanda. Their first hub is based in Muhonga district, about an hour's drive west of Kigali, Rwanda. The only thing healthcare workers will need is a mobile phone and a "mailbox" drop point on the ground about the size of three or four parking spaces. A text message comes in requesting blood, and Zipline employees--including both Americans and local Rwandans--print a QR code with coordinates, flight plan and other things necessary for the drop.

A Zipline employee pulls blood from temperature-controlled storage, wraps it in butcher paper secured with biodegradable tape, affixes the QR code that gets scanned to send the data to an iPad which communicates with the drone. The blood package is topped with a paper parachute and spring-loaded into the Zip drone, capable of carrying just over 3 pounds of supplies. The drone takes off from the clinic, travels at 50 to 85 miles per hour to the facility and pops out the package from about 100 feet in the air to parachute down to the mailbox.

Although Rwanda is the first government to sign a deal with Zipline, the company is in discussions with several other countries to deliver other types of medical products, from antibiotics to rabies antivenin to vaccines. The company wouldn't disclose how much the contracts were worth, but the Rwandan government's internal cost analysis estimated the cost to be on par with current costs after considering road transportation costs and the blood products lost from spoilage.

Using mobile phones was an obvious choice in African countries, where the lack of long-distance phone lines meant widespread cell phone adoption as soon as they was available. But it was also an early warning mobile alert system with 300 mobile phones at hospitals across Tanzania that initially inspired Rinaudo to create Zipline. The system allowed healthcare workers to text the basic medical products that dying patients needed to survive. The problem was that most of those supplies never arrived.

"We were basically looking at a database of death," Rinaudo said. "The half where we know someone is dying—that was built. The other half is what we did—help is on the way."

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