Pennsylvania State University professor Dipanjan Pan, along with researchers from other institutions, has been awarded a $2.7 million grant from National Institutes of Health to fund research into developing a blood substitute that is expected to act like human red blood cells.
According to a March 31, 2025 press release from PSU, blood loss is the leading cause of death in trauma patients between the ages of 1 and 46 years, largely because they cannot access safe blood sources quickly enough. Hence the team is trying to find a possible solution through developing freeze-dried synthetic blood.
Pan, the Dorothy Foehr Huck & J. Lloyd Chair Professor in Nanomedicine at Penn State, recently received a four-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to develop this next generation of synthetic blood, the press release noted.
“Artificial blood is described as the ‘Holy Grail’ of trauma medicine. Researchers have been battling to develop it for 150 years, with many failures along the way,” Pan said.
“Mother nature is hard to mimic, but we’re getting closer,” he added. Pan is also a professor of materials science and engineering and of nuclear engineering.
“Our goal is to design and optimize a blood substitute prototype, called Nano-RBC, that is based on a deformable nanoparticle. It is similar in shape to red blood cells and incorporates high-per-particle payloads of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen.”
The odds of survival increase dramatically when a person can receive a transfusion before losing too much blood; hence the product he and the team are involved in developing would help greatly in rural and war-torn areas the specializing facilities for storage are mostly not available, Pan explained.
“There is a need for an artificial oxygen carrier to substitute for banked blood in settings where stored blood is unavailable or undesirable,” Pan said. He and his team are aiming to better the earlier failures in developing the substance that will mimic red blood cell’s physiological functions.
“The ultimate goal is to develop safe, dried oxygen therapeutics envisioned for use when stored red blood cells are unavailable, undesirable or in short supply,” Pan said, adding, “The inventiveness of materials researchers in health and medicine is limitless, and we’re demonstrating that in this ambitious and highly collaborative project.”
According to the press release, Pan and his team previously developed ErythroMer, an artificial blood product that emulates the physiological properties of red blood cells, like their ability to bind and release oxygen.
That work, conducted over a decade and now in advanced stages of animal studies, was funded by more than $14 million in grants from the NIH, the Department of Defense and other agencies. The project — which has been featured in Science, the New Yorker and Popular Science, among other media outlets — is also part of a larger $46 million multi-institutional consortium, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“While Erythromer emulated the functional and physiological properties of the red blood cells, our current project is taking this research forward to the next level by mimicking the morphological characteristics of red blood cells — their physical shape and how they move,” Pan said.
