DARPA Is Building Powdered Blood That Works for Any Patient. The Funding Just Expanded.

Somewhere in a University of Maryland lab, researchers are turning a white powder into something that functions like human blood. Mix it with saline, and the resulting fluid carries oxygen, clots wounds, and maintains blood pressure — without refrigeration, without blood typing, without a donor in the room. If the timeline holds, it could be in human trials within the next two years.

This is DARPA's Fieldable Solutions for Hemorrhage with bio-Artificial Resuscitation Products program — FSHARP — a $46.4 million effort to build the first universal, shelf-stable whole blood substitute. And on May 6, 2026, DARPA opened a new companion SBIR topic called SWiFT (Smart Whole Blood Field Transfusion system) that funds the device to collect, test, and transfuse real blood in the field when the synthetic version is not enough. Together, these programs represent the most ambitious attempt in military medical history to solve the blood supply problem that kills more survivable casualties than any other factor.

The Problem That Kills More Soldiers Than Bullets

Hemorrhage is the leading cause of survivable, traumatic pre-hospital death in both military and civilian settings. Not infection. Not organ failure. Bleeding. A wounded soldier who reaches a surgical facility alive has a survival rate above 90 percent. The challenge is the hours before arrival — the "golden hour" and beyond — when the simplest intervention (replacing lost blood volume) is often logistically impossible.

The reasons are brutally practical. Whole blood requires cold-chain logistics: refrigeration from donation through transport to transfusion. In a forward operating base in a contested environment, maintaining a blood supply chain means dedicated refrigeration units, regular resupply flights, blood typing equipment, and trained technicians — infrastructure that competes with ammunition, water, and food for limited transport capacity. Whole blood has a 21-day shelf life when refrigerated and begins degrading immediately at ambient temperature.

The result is a gap between what medicine knows works (whole blood transfusion) and what combat conditions allow. That gap is measured in lives.

FSHARP: Engineering Blood From Scratch

DARPA's Biological Technologies Office launched FSHARP to close that gap permanently. The program, managed by Robert Murray, funds a consortium led by the University of Maryland School of Medicine in collaboration with more than a dozen universities and biotech companies. The four-year research program is building a synthetic whole blood substitute from three engineered components, each designed to replicate a critical function of natural blood.

ErythroMer — the synthetic red blood cell. Developed by KaloCyte, a company co-founded by bioengineer Dipanjan Pan at Penn State and transfusion medicine expert Philip Spinella at the University of Pittsburgh, ErythroMer is an artificial oxygen carrier built on a nanotechnology platform. The particle is engineered to bind and release oxygen with kinetics similar to natural hemoglobin, but without the surface proteins that cause blood type incompatibility. ErythroMer is universal — it should be safe for any recipient regardless of blood type, eliminating the need for crossmatching in the field.

The breakthrough that makes FSHARP viable is that ErythroMer can be freeze-dried into a powder. The resulting product is shelf-stable for years at ambient temperature, weighs a fraction of liquid blood products, and can be reconstituted by mixing with widely available saline. A medic's pack that currently cannot carry blood could carry dozens of units of powdered ErythroMer.

Synthetic platelets. The FSHARP consortium is developing artificial platelet analogs that replicate the clotting function of natural platelets. Traumatic hemorrhage triggers coagulopathy — a breakdown of the body's clotting cascade — that makes bleeding self-reinforcing. Natural platelets are among the most fragile blood components, with a shelf life of only five days under ideal storage conditions. Synthetic alternatives that can be freeze-dried alongside ErythroMer would address the clotting deficit that makes severe hemorrhage lethal even when volume replacement is available.

Freeze-dried plasma. The third component replaces the protein-rich fluid that maintains blood pressure and carries clotting factors. Freeze-dried plasma already exists in limited military use, but FSHARP aims to integrate it into a single reconstitutable product alongside synthetic red cells and platelets — creating a true whole blood analog rather than separate component therapies.

The combined product is designed to be tailorable to specific injury profiles. A traumatic brain injury with hemorrhage presents different physiological demands than a blast injury with multiple wound sites. FSHARP formulations would allow field medics to adjust the product profile based on injury assessment — a level of precision that current blood products cannot match.

SWiFT: The $300 Autonomous Transfusion Device

On May 6, 2026, DARPA's Biological Technologies Office opened a new SBIR topic — DPA26BZ01-DV003, Smart Whole Blood Field Transfusion system — that addresses the other half of the battlefield blood problem. Even when blood is available (from walking blood banks or eventually from FSHARP), the process of collecting, testing, and transfusing it in the field is dangerously slow and error-prone.

Current procedures for emergency field transfusion have less than a 60 percent success rate. The average time from initiating a walking blood bank to completing transfusion of one unit of blood exceeds 40 minutes. In a mass casualty scenario, that timeline is lethal.

SWiFT seeks proposals for a self-contained, autonomous device capable of blood collection, temporary storage (under four hours), diagnostic testing, and transfusion — with continuous monitoring of both donor and recipient vital signs. The device specifications are deliberately aggressive:

• Target cost: Under $300 at market price
• Weight: Under 5 pounds when empty
• Durability: Drop-survivable from standing height
• Storage: Fits in a standard "golden hour cooler"
• Disposable: Designed for single-use, discarded after transfusion

The device must autonomously perform vascular access and IV placement, blood type assessment and infectious disease screening, real-time anticoagulant infusion and blood agitation, recipient crossmatching and compatibility verification, pump-driven transfusion with heated circuits, and optional calcium infusion to reverse citrate anticoagulation. Non-invasive sensors must continuously monitor heart rate, SpO2, respirations, blood pressure, and temperature — and automatically alert medical personnel to signs of transfusion reaction.

The proposals window is open now through June 3, 2026. This is a Phase I SBIR, meaning awards are in the range of $100,000-$275,000 for proof-of-concept work, with potential Phase II follow-on for prototype development.

Beyond the Battlefield: Why Civilian Medicine Is Watching

The military framing of these programs understates their potential impact. The same constraints that make blood logistics difficult in combat — cold chain requirements, short shelf life, blood typing delays, trained personnel scarcity — limit blood availability in civilian emergency medicine.

Rural EMS systems, which cover 20 percent of the U.S. population, rarely carry blood products because maintaining a cold chain in an ambulance is impractical. Mass casualty events overwhelm local blood banks within hours. Disaster response in areas with damaged infrastructure faces the same supply chain challenges as forward operating bases. And globally, the World Health Organization estimates that 42 percent of countries cannot meet their blood supply needs through voluntary donation alone.

A shelf-stable, universal blood substitute that can be stored in a closet for years and reconstituted with saline would fundamentally change emergency medicine worldwide — not as a replacement for donated blood in hospital settings, but as a bridge therapy that keeps patients alive until they reach definitive care.

The SWiFT device has parallel civilian applications. An autonomous transfusion system that costs $300 and fits in a cooler could be standard equipment in every ambulance, every rural clinic, every disaster response kit. The technology to make that possible does not exist yet, which is precisely the point of the SBIR.

The SBIR Opportunity: Who Should Apply

The SWiFT SBIR (Topic DPA26BZ01-DV003) is open to U.S.-based small businesses with strong principal investigators. DARPA's Biological Technologies Office manages the topic, and proposals are due June 3, 2026.

The ideal applicant profile spans multiple disciplines: biomedical device engineering, point-of-care diagnostics, microfluidics, non-invasive sensor integration, and automated fluid management. Companies with existing capabilities in portable medical devices, field-deployable diagnostics, or military medical equipment have a natural advantage, but the specifications are ambitious enough that novel approaches from adjacent fields — consumer health wearables, lab-on-a-chip systems, autonomous IV therapy — could be competitive.

Several strategic considerations for proposers:

Frame dual-use from the start. DARPA evaluates commercialization potential alongside technical merit. A device that serves both military and civilian EMS markets has a stronger business case and a clearer Phase III transition pathway than one designed exclusively for military use.

Address the hardest subsystem first. The autonomous vascular access requirement — placing an IV without trained personnel — is the technical crux. Multiple startups are working on this problem independently (using ultrasound-guided robotics, infrared vein visualization, or AI-guided needle placement), but integrating it into a $300 disposable device is a different challenge entirely. Proposals that demonstrate a credible approach to this subsystem will stand out.

Do not ignore the regulatory pathway. A device that performs blood collection, diagnostic testing, and transfusion crosses multiple FDA regulatory categories. Phase I proposals that acknowledge the regulatory complexity and propose a realistic clearance strategy demonstrate the kind of systems thinking that DARPA program managers value.

The FSHARP program is further along and not currently soliciting new performers, but researchers working on synthetic oxygen carriers, artificial platelet technologies, hemostatic materials, or freeze-drying biology should monitor DARPA's Biological Technologies Office for future related topics. The SWiFT SBIR is explicitly designed to complement FSHARP — creating the delivery system for the synthetic blood products that FSHARP is developing.

What Comes Next

DARPA has indicated that animal trial results for the combined FSHARP product are progressing. The April 2026 Military Times lab tour showed synthetic blood being created and tested, and DARPA has publicly stated the goal of human clinical trials within the program timeline. If the powdered blood performs in human subjects the way it has in animal models, the path to FDA approval and military fielding could move faster than typical medical device timelines — DARPA's track record of accelerating regulatory processes through military necessity provides a template.

For the broader biomedical research community, these programs signal a sustained federal investment in blood substitute and transfusion technology that extends well beyond a single SBIR topic. The underlying science — nanotechnology-based oxygen carriers, synthetic coagulation systems, autonomous medical devices — represents a research frontier with funding pathways across DARPA, ARPA-H, NIH, and the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. Platforms like Granted can help researchers track these opportunities across agencies and identify the specific solicitations that match their capabilities as they emerge.