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. A possible solution? Freeze-dried synthetic blood. A multi-institutional team led by Dipanjan Pan, the Dorothy Foehr Huck & J. Lloyd Chair Professor in Nanomedicine at Penn State, recently received a five-year, $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to develop the next generation of synthetic blood.