Apian has flown more than 13,000 clinical items across London by drone since October 2024, by the count its vice president of robotics and design, George Cave, gave in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday. He posted it with the picture that shows what two years of that work looks like from above. Cave pulled every blood-sample delivery between Guy’s Hospital and St Thomas’ Hospital out of the company’s backend database and rendered the flight logs in Blender over a 3D model of the city. Hundreds of flights stack into one orange band from London Bridge to Westminster Bridge.
The same morning, Matternet said its drones are now carrying pediatric pathology samples out of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Apian, the third London hospital trust on a network DroneXL first covered when the Guy’s and St Thomas’ trial was announced in September 2024. The two hospitals in Cave’s render sit 1.3 miles (2.1 km) apart. The trust said the road run between their labs took more than half an hour.
The Guy’s to St Thomas’ Route Moved 6,000 Samples at 28% Lower Cost
The Guy’s and St Thomas’ service began in October 2024 as a six-month trial flown by Wing, moving blood samples between Synnovis laboratories for surgery patients at high risk of bleeding. Apian says the first phase carried more than 6,000 samples and cut costs by an average of 28%.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority approved the airspace, per the trust’s September 2024 announcement. Wing flew on demand on weekdays, up to 10 transfers a day with several samples in each canister, and the trust put the flight at under two minutes against the courier’s half hour. Wing’s own account of the launch ran in November 2024.
The trial outlived its six months. Apian chief executive Alexander Trewby put the count at 5,000 samples when he announced Matternet joining the network in June 2025. The 6,000 figure and the cost saving came with the south west London expansion in January 2026, which also put the CO2 cut per delivery at 98.4% against ad hoc courier vans. The CAA has since approved continued operations on the route until February 2027, per the operations page Apian keeps for the service. That page now lists the Matternet M2 as the aircraft, cruising at about 295 feet (90 meters) and close to 37 mph (60 km/h), Monday to Friday from 9 am to 4 pm, with the direct flight taking about four minutes against the under two minutes the trust quoted for Wing’s aircraft.
This month the same corridor extends to Synnovis’s Blackfriars hub laboratory, which analyzes 20,000 samples a day. The first flights there carry bone marrow samples used to diagnose and monitor blood disorders such as acute leukemia, including samples from children treated at Evelina London Children’s Hospital, per Synnovis’s September announcement. Cave wrote that “I’ll always have a soft spot for the first patients we helped at GSTT.”
Matternet Added Great Ormond Street on Tuesday
Matternet said on Tuesday that its M2 drones are flying pediatric pathology samples from Great Ormond Street Hospital to The Doctors Laboratory. Apian says validation flights began in July under a six-month CAA approval. The hospital’s clinical and scientific leads have since signed off a routine service.
Matternet claims the route cuts urgent delivery times by up to 90% and says more sites are planned, per its release. The M2 carries up to 4.4 pounds (2 kg) and cruises at about 360 feet (110 meters) on the Great Ormond Street corridor, Monday to Friday from 8 am to 5 pm, with a pilot in command overseeing every flight, per Apian’s operations page for the hospital. Dr Kimberly Gilmour, the hospital’s chief of laboratory medicine, said “When samples reach the laboratory in minutes, we can begin testing sooner.”
Matternet is the newer of the two American operators on this network. It went public in June through a reverse merger, trades as MTTN, says it was the first drone delivery company to get a standard FAA type certificate, and named Apian as the UK launch partner for its M3 platform last month. London is its first UK operation. Wing, the Alphabet unit, now flies the south west London route from Nelson Health Centre in Raynes Park to St George’s Hospital in Tooting, which started in February 2026 and is slated to extend to St Helier, Croydon and Kingston.
Apian was founded by NHS doctors, and this month it said its ground robots had moved more than 1,400 live patient samples between drone landing pads and the Blackfriars lab in supervised trials.
DroneXL’s Take
This is the drone delivery I am for. A bone marrow sample from a child with suspected leukemia has to get from the ward to the one lab that can read it, and every minute it spends in a courier van in London traffic is a minute a doctor waits for an answer. The payload weighs grams, and it is worth more than anything Amazon will ever put in an MK30. Compare that with Westborough, which voted 510 to 13 to keep Amazon’s 77.9-pound drones from dropping toothpaste on lawns in Massachusetts. I don’t think the town is wrong, and I don’t think London is either. Westborough is being asked to accept the aircraft for a five-pound consumer order, and London accepted it for a child’s blood. The two votes should come out differently. A drone over a city needs urgency and value to justify it, and this route has both. Cave’s map shows two years of it, and I would hang it in every town hall about to vote on a drone bylaw.
Sources: George Cave on LinkedIn, Matternet, Apian, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Synnovis via Pathology in Practice
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
