There is increasing evidence of traction in demand for the drone delivery of blood and medical products. With multiple high-profile pilots taking place, alongside existing services worldwide, eventual widespread acceptance is a given, even if much more work still must be done around everyday drone deliveries for other, less urgent products.
There is currently a pilot service for the delivery of blood samples by medical drone for Guy’s and St Thomas’ National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust in London, in partnership with Apian, a healthcare logistics company founded by NHS doctors, and Wing, a global drone delivery company that is part of Google鈥檚 parent company, Alphabet.
The trial began in October 2024 for an initial six-month period until 7 April 2025. The Civil Aviation Authority then approved a further six-month extension to the airspace approval until 7 October 2025. Given how close that date is, it is likely that an announcement may not be too far away about the launch of a formal service, or at least, a further trial. The two venues at Guy鈥檚 Hospital and St Thomas鈥� Hospital are only a couple of miles apart from each other. But delivering blood samples by road between the two locations still takes around half an hour, depending on traffic. In contrast, delivery by drone between the two laboratories takes less than two minutes with the added benefit of decreasing carbon emissions and reducing traffic congestion.
ZTE leads blood delivery project in Anyang, China
The London trial has been well-profiled publicly. But it is far from the only one currently taking place. At the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona in March, it emerged that a project led by the Chinese company ZTE was doing something similar.
The ZTE team, together with China Unicom and Yunhuan Connected Drone Technology, won the Global Mobile (鈥楪lomo鈥�) award in Barcelona for Best Mobile Innovation for Cities. The companies created a smart blood delivery service in urban blood stations in the north-eastern Chinese city of Anyang. The project was conceived to address the challenges of urban traffic congestion and delayed emergency response times.
The project covers a 1,200km虏 urban airspace and features ten delivery routes that extend over 15km and serve multiple hospitals across the city. With over 50 flights operating daily, it has become the industry’s largest low-altitude drone delivery network for medical supplies, transporting blood products, laboratory samples, pathological sections, emergency medicines, and surgical supplies.
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By GlobalDataAccording to operational data, the initiative has notably improved medical logistics efficiency, reducing blood delivery times from 40 minutes to 15 minutes. The improved responsiveness has optimised surgery scheduling, reduced blood wastage, and resulted in a 20% decrease in hospital blood costs and a 10% reduction in patient blood expenses.
Blood and medical product delivery in Africa
Africa is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to the drone delivery of blood and medical products. The San-Francisco-based company Zipline began delivering blood by drone in Rwanda in 2016, and charities like Save the Children cite the service for its role in revolutionising medical care for women giving birth at Rwanda鈥檚 largest refugee camp. Save the Children renovated the medical centre at the Mahama Refugee Camp in eastern Rwanda near the Tanzania border in 2023 and partnered with Zipline to enable quick delivery of blood and other medical supplies. By June 2024, referrals to the Kirehe District Hospital, located 24 miles away (a journey that takes two hours by road), had halved. Meanwhile, births at the camp鈥檚 medical centre doubled to 1,256 between April 2023 and March 2024, compared to 672 the previous year.
There is a much wider story to be told in time about how widespread drone-based delivery came about. But it is surely right that it is the necessity of drone-based blood delivery for medical reasons, saving time and saving lives – in Rwanda, Ghana, London, Anyang, and beyond – that is the real breakthrough.
