UST034

92 A s the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage, medical researchers are under greater pressure than ever to study and understand the coronavirus as soon as possible, to enable them to develop and test potential treatments or cures. It is therefore vital that clinicians have access to the best technologies and logistics services, to minimise the delays between collecting samples and experimenting on them. To that end, the Becker & Kollegen laboratory has recently partnered with UAV developer Quantum-Systems in order to start trialling the delivery of coronavirus samples from a mobile Covid field-testing station to the lab by UAV. Both companies, based in Munich, Germany, wanted to prove the advantages of UAS logistics over traditional couriering. As Robert Hirt, chief digital officer at Becker & Kollegen says, “We at the lab have a concept for improving the efficacy of medical research, which we call NTSD, or No- Touch Sample Distribution. “Essentially, we want to reduce the number of touching points on the specimens and sample materials coming into the lab. Currently, someone is needed to pick up boxes of samples from the hospitals or mobile test stations, put them in a car and drive them to the laboratory. They put the samples on a desk, someone opens that box, takes the samples out, sorts them, scans them and so on. “So there are a lot of points where the samples are touched, handled and thus warmed and shaken. Human interaction is required for transporting, checking, sorting and correctly distributing material to the respective analysis areas. However, that interaction does nothing to make samples better or more useful – quite the opposite, in fact.” Becker & Kollegen is therefore looking to develop an infrastructure and set of procedures for researchers in which a doctor’s creation of a sample – by putting blood from a test patient into a sealed tube, for example – would be the only time a human touches the tube. Rory Jackson reports on early trials of a UAV system for the swift and safe delivery of Covid-19 samples for lab analysis Germ of an idea The Becker & Kollegen laboratory sees UAV deliveries of coronavirus test samples as key to its concept of faster and more controlled clinical research (Images courtesy of Quantum-Systems) October/November 2020 | Unmanned Systems Technology