By Sophie Lindqvist

DARPA has committed $73 million to a program that aims to put freeze-dried plasma, platelets and red blood cell substitutes into field use by 2029, betting that three parallel clinical tracks can solve a logistics problem that kills roughly 10,000 Americans a year.

The program, RAPIID — resuscitation and prevention of ischemia-induced dysfunction — is led by Lieutenant Commander Robert Murray, a Navy officer with a PhD in physiology who joined DARPA's Biological Technologies Office as deputy program manager in 2024 and was named a program manager in 2026. DARPA issued the call for proposals this past May, and in early October the agency announced funding for blood-component work at five additional companies.

Why the military wants dried blood

The core problem is storage. Whole blood lasts 35 days refrigerated. Platelets, stored at room temperature, last a week or less. Frozen red cells and plasma spoil within days of thawing. "What happens if I don't know when I'm going to be attacked? Well, thaw it and you let it expire, right?" Murray said.

The human cost is measured. A 2025 study in Transfusion found that of 1.2 million US trauma patients who potentially needed blood before reaching a hospital, just 1% received it. The American College of Surgeons attributes about 10,000 preventable US deaths a year to the shortage; globally, the figure likely runs into the millions. Hemorrhage drives roughly 90% of preventable battlefield deaths.

Timing matters most. A JAMA study of combat injuries in Afghanistan put the threshold at 36 minutes from injury to transfusion start. "[You're] almost guaranteed to survive if you get the blood before that 36-minute mark," Murray said. After that, survival chances "starts to drop precipitously."

The strategic trigger dates to 2018, when the National Defense Strategy shifted planning toward a ground war with China or Russia. Murray served on Okinawa, where a single blood bank serves roughly 27,000 Marines plus personnel across the 100-million-square-mile USPACOM area. The blood center sits about 200 meters from the island's satellite communications hub; one missile strike could destroy both.

What does each product actually deliver?

Plasma is the mature piece. The FDA has cleared two freeze-dried plasma products for emergency military use in the past two years, one of them also for civilians.

Platelets: Cellphire, a company outside RAPIID, has freeze-dried actual human platelets and shown safety and efficacy in human trials — but donor dependence raises scaling questions. Inside RAPIID, Anirban Sen Gupta of Case Western Reserve, with University of Pittsburgh collaborators, developed SynthoPlate: a lipid nanoparticle carrying three peptides that bind von Willebrand factor, collagen and fibrinogen. It keeps over a year at room temperature and at least three months at 122 °F. A 2026 paper in Advanced Science reported it cut bleeding time and blood loss by more than half in mice with low platelet counts; a separate study safely injected it into rats' bone marrow, a useful route when no vein is available.

Red cells: KaloCyte's ErythroMer packages hemoglobin "upcycled" from expiring donor blood inside a lipid nanoparticle with a pH-sensitive lipid, KC-1003, that toggles oxygen uptake and release. It is freeze-dried, stable two years at room temperature, and in a 2016 rodent study stabilized blood pressure and oxygen delivery in animals with up to 70% of their blood removed — without the vasoconstriction that sank earlier hemoglobin carriers. Supply is a constraint: KaloCyte can source only 1,000 to 2,000 units of expiring hemoglobin a month and has licensed a yeast strain to produce its own.

Octapharma USA holds the sole RAPIID plasma contract and will compete in platelets with an FDA-approved clotting-protein pair mounted on a disc-shaped nanoparticle. Abioremedi is pursuing non-hemoglobin oxygen carriers — cytoglobin, neuroglobin, myoglobin — encased in albumin.

What are the risks?

History counsels caution. The HBOC HemAssist lasted about a year in cold storage but constricted blood vessels; in one trial, 24 of 52 recipients died versus 8 of 46 controls, and trials ended in 1998. A 2008 JAMA review found hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers tripled heart attack risk and raised death risk 30%. Neither ErythroMer nor SynthoPlate has been tested in humans.

Shibani Pati, who directs the Center for Research in Transfusion Medicine and Cell Therapies at UCSF, argued Murray is making the task too "DARPA hard" by backing products untested in humans. "They need to make a very concerted effort to take what they've already developed and push it through to approval through the FDA," she said. "Not start with moonshot projects that will take forever to get through." Murray noted he can only select companies that apply; Cellphire did not.

John Holcomb, a surgery professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and former combat surgeon, flagged interaction risk: red cells aid clotting, platelets are anti-inflammatory, plasma tunes coagulation. Under the prior $47.5 million FSHARP program, animal studies tested the products as a cocktail against whole blood and met program metrics in all areas but one — clotting fell short, possibly from charge repulsion between molecules. "I do not think they will replicate all the functions that whole blood does in our body," Holcomb said. "But you may not need to."

Murray has structured RAPIID as a one-year gauntlet: each contractor gets only a single guaranteed year before the 2029 deadline, with large FDA-regulated animal studies first and human trials — run by the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, including ambulance use in severely injured patients — in years two and three. He is already sourcing combat-durable storage bags, finger-stick tests and battery-powered heaters. He told his boss in 2024 that even if FSHARP failed, "we should invest 50 million more dollars in it and do it again."