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In the Air With Zipline’s Medical Delivery Drones

1) What is Zipline?

Zipline is an American medical product delivery company headquartered in South San Francisco, California, that designs, builds, and operates small drone aircraft for delivery of medical products, with a focus on providing services in Africa. The company operates two distribution centers in Rwanda and four in Ghana. In Rwanda, the company began He left I think drone deliveries in late 2016, and primarily delivers blood to urgent medical situations. 2) Introduction Rwanda (Country in East Africa ) is known as the land of a thousand hills, and our car seems to go over every one of them as we drive from the small town of Muhanga to the even smaller town of Kinazi. The 50-kilometer trip into western Rwanda will take us well over an hour. Rwanda has modernized rapidly since the 1990s, when the country began its recovery from civil war and genocide. The government has also invested heavily in health care. But its push to construct hospitals and clinics has resulted in some shiny new medical facilities opening their doors to patients before the roads leading to them have been improved. Traffic is slow on the two-lane highways that twist around the hills, while the roads that branch off toward small towns soon turn into dirt. For hospitals in need of critical medical supplies, Rwanda’s roads pose a real problem. Hospital administrators worry most about blood and blood products, which have a short shelf life and strict storage requirements. It’s also difficult to predict how many packs of each blood type will be needed at a given facility, and when. In an emergency, it can take up to 5 hours for a Rwandan hospital to

receive a blood delivery via road, which could easily mean death for a patient in need. 3) Challenge Access to vital health products worldwide is hampered by the last mile problem: the difficulty of supplying medicine from central storage to remotely located patients when and where they need it. Even in the U.S., this problem requires health systems to tolerate high medicine waste, expensive emergency trips, and sub-optimal care strategies. In far too many other areas, the same problem means that people in need of lifesaving care do not get the medicine they need to survive. Zipline’s medical drone delivery system is designed to eliminate this problem. 4) Solution Three entrepreneurs—William Hetzler, Keller Rinaudo, and Keenan Wyrobeck —founded Zipline in 2014 with the goal of solving such problems through ondemand deliveries by drone. Rwanda was the ideal test bed, with its challenging terrain, relatively small size (about the same area as the U.S. state of Maryland), extensive wireless connectivity, and receptive government. By partnering with health-care facilities, governments and pharmaceuticals businesses, Rinaudo said Zipline aims to provide a much higher level of access to necessary treatments wherever people live. Zipline uses fixed-wing drones, as pictured above, which will fly autonomously. The drones release small packages attached to parachutes: they do not land at the delivery destination before returning to their central base. The drones are launched from a catapult: they fly below 500ft in order to avoid the airspace used by passenger planes. The drones’ range is 93 miles; but the company says that they could potentially fly almost twice that distance. The drones are battery-powered and use GPS location data, communicating with the Zipline base and Rwandan air traffic control via cellular connection. They send back information to both their base and to Rwandan air traffic control via a cellular connection. The company’s drones carry up to about 4 lbs (or 1.75 kg) of cargo, fly at up to 68 mph (or 110 km/hr) in all weather and have a round-trip range of about 99 miles (or 160 km). In Rwanda, Zipline’s drones have flown more than 1 million km and have made more than 13,000 deliveries. Zipline’s efforts illustrate the humanitarian potential of drones. The company anticipates that the additional funding will support global expansion across Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Americas and position the company

to serve 700 million people in the next five years.

5) Benifits Since launching its drone delivery service in Rwanda in October of 2016, Zipline has flown over one million autonomous kilometers. The company has made more than 13,000 deliveries, about a third of which have been in emergencies when someone’s life was on the line. Zipline now delivers more than 65 percent of Rwanda’s blood supply outside of the capital, Kigali. The expansion of Zipline’s operations in both Ghana and Rwanda will increase the number of health facilities the company serves by almost 100x. In the last six months, Zipline has gone from one distribution in one country delivering blood to 21 hospitals to operating six distribution centers in two countries delivering more than 170 different vaccines, blood products, and medications to 2,500 health facilities serving close to 22 million people Zipline’s commercial partnerships with Ghana and Rwanda are expected to help save tens of thousands of lives over the next several years. Zipline’s goal is to serve 700 million people in the next five years. 6) Result

Today, this service has helped ensure that hospitals always have access to blood products, increasing the use of rare and specialized blood products by 175 percent and reducing waste and spoilage by over 95 percent. In December of 2018, the Government of Rwanda expanded its blood delivery partnership with Zipline by adding the delivery of 169 other critical and lifesaving medical products, like emergency vaccines, routine vaccines, and essential medical supplies. Zipline also launched a second distribution center in eastern Rwanda, allowing the company to provide lifesaving medicine to most of the country’s 12 million citizens within minutes. In April of 2019, Zipline partnered with the Government of Ghana to launch the world’s largest medical drone delivery service. The revolutionary new

service uses drones to make on-demand, emergency deliveries of 148 different vaccines, blood products, and life-saving medications. The service will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from four distribution centers—each equipped with 30 drones—and deliver to 2,000 health facilities serving 12 million people across the country. Together, all four distribution centers will make up to 600 on-demand delivery flights a day on behalf of the Government of Ghana. Each Zipline distribution center has the capacity to make up to 500 flights per day. Now Zipline, which ranked No. 39 on the 2019 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has raised $190 million in venture funding and attained a $1.2 billion valuation from its investors. Its backers include Baillie Gifford, The Rise Fund (which is TPG’s global impact fund), Temasek, Alphabet’s investment arm GV and Katalyst Ventures. The funding brings Zipline’s total capital raised to $225 million. Images

1. Zipline drone travels along a predetermined flight path to its destination.

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2. When it arrives at the hospital, it drops its cargo by parachute to a specified location—in this case, a field next to the parking lot.

3. Hospital staff members get an automatic text alert 5 minutes before the drone arrives.

4. A staff member retrieves the package and brings it into the hospital.

5. When the drone returns to Zipline's fulfillment center, it's caught in the air by a capture wire that snags its tail hook.

6. Technicians remove its battery pack for recharging

7. The drone is modular, so they can also easily remove its wings.

8. Finally, they carry the chassis away....