'It was a race against time': How the world 1st lung delivery by drone saved an Ontario man's life
CBC
The last thing Alain Hodak remembers before his double lung transplant surgery was excitedly waiting in the operating room for a call from a doctor on the roof of the hospital, saying his drone had arrived.
That drone carried a pair of lungs 1.5 kilometers across downtown Toronto in a world-first delivery that Hodak had eagerly agreed to be part of in September.
An engineer by trade and a lover of drones, 63-year-old Hodak proved the ideal patient for the world's first transplant of lungs delivered by an unmanned drone, completed by University Health Network (UHN) and Unither Bioelectronique.
The lungs travelled in a purpose-built drone from Toronto Western Hospital to Toronto General Hospital — a journey that lasted just six minutes, but could change the future of organ delivery.
And Hodak is proud to be the guinea pig. The Ottawa resident was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis in 2019 and says, before the surgery, trying to breathe was "unbearable."
"Having no air, I was on oxygen in industrial quantities of 25 litres a minute of oxygen, which is pretty much as much as you could put in. And now I'm able to breathe, and I'm almost sometimes surprised about breathing," Hodak told CBC News.
Hodak's condition deteriorated in early 2021 and he was told his only option was a lung transplant. He was placed on the waiting list and rented a condo in Toronto in June with his wife to be close enough to the hospital, should a donor organ become available.