Synthetic blood could save thousands of lives thanks to $46M grant

This is bloody good news.

Scientists are one step closer to making faux blood a reality with funding of more than $46 million. The potentially life-saving technology will be designed by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and in collaboration with the university’s School of Pharmacy, for the next four years.

“We have assembled an outstanding team to develop a bio-synthetic whole-blood product that can be freeze-dried for easy portability, storage, and reconstitution,” the study’s principal investigator Dr. Allan Doctor said in a statement. 

“It will be designed for easy use in the field by medics at the point of injury, and will perform like a traditional blood transfusion to, for example, stabilize a patient’s blood pressure or facilitate blood clotting,” added Doctor, who is also a professor of pediatrics and director of the Center for Blood Oxygen Transport & Hemostasis at the university.

The $46.4 million project, which is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will seek to design artificial blood that could save the lives of trauma victims.

Bleeding is the most common cause of death during trauma. Annually, more than 60,000 Americans die of uncontrolled blood loss. And while transfusions are touted as the gold standard for treatment, it’s often difficult to find a blood-type match in time, or have enough of it in refrigerated storage to do the job. Artificial blood could remedy such a problems.

With the help of experts and scientists from other universities, the development of artificial blood has the potential to be more flexible due to the extended shelf life — therefore saving more lives.

“About 20,000 Americans each year bleed to death before they can be brought to the hospital,” Dr. Mark Gladwin, who is the dean at the university’s School of Medicine and vice president of medical affairs for the institution, said in a statement.

“Transfusion at the point of injury is required to stabilize them and limit other organ injury,” the distinguished professor added. “This project will utilize cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence to predict interactions among the blood components in various trauma model systems, which would not have been possible a decade ago.”

The research team will be working on developing an artificial oxygen carrier — otherwise known as a red blood cell — which Doctor previously pioneered. The end product will be comprised of multiple components: synthetic platelets developed by Dr. Anirban Sen Gupta of Case Western Reserve University, freeze-dried plasma manufactured by Teleflex and a substance called ErythroMer, which was made by a company co-founded by Dr. Doctor called KaloCyte.

The “key therapeutic functions” would be to stop bleeding, deliver oxygen and replace volume — all of which the artificial blood must do in the first phase of the study, researchers said.

In the second phase, scientists will analyze how efficient and safe the blood product is in “increasingly complex and realistic trauma models,” which will include creating methods to store and extend the shelf life of the blood for months in “extreme environments” and varying conditions.

Throughout the process, the team will also be committed to refining the blood’s manufacturing by figuring out how to navigate the “real-world pragmatic challenges” across all fronts: production, packaging, scaling and quality.

“We are well-positioned to support this highly complex project that requires the use of advanced modeling and simulation, and a machine learning software system to optimize the prototypes and to test for safety and efficacy in models of complex trauma with multiple complications,” study co-investigator and professor Dr. Joga Gobburu, the director of the Center for Translational Medicine at the university, said in a statement.