Pentagon awards $8.3M for 10-minute blood clotting test

DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency, has awarded Abram Scientific a contract worth up to $8.3 million to develop CoagCare, a handheld device that shows how well a wounded person’s blood is clotting in under 10 minutes from a single drop, so medics can decide on transfusions far from a hospital.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funds high-risk technology for the U.S. Department of War, and over the past few years it has put a growing share of its medical work into one problem: keeping badly wounded troops alive until they reach surgery. Abram Scientific, based in Menlo Park, California, announced the award on Oct. 13, a year after DARPA gave it $2 million in October 2025 to shrink the device to a size that can travel with medics.

Uncontrolled bleeding is one of the leading causes of preventable death after severe injury, on the battlefield and in civilian emergencies, and the best treatment is whole blood given as soon as possible. Donated blood has to be kept refrigerated and expires within weeks, which makes it hard to stock at small outposts, aboard ships or with units that may wait days for evacuation in a large war. Military medics often fall back on “walking blood banks,” drawing fresh blood from fellow soldiers on the spot, but that only works when donors are close by and screened.

DARPA is trying to solve that with a program called RAPIID, short for Resuscitation and Prevention of Ischemia-Induced Dysfunction, launched in May. The 36-month effort aims to turn lab-made blood components, such as oxygen-carrying substitutes and dried plasma, into a shelf-stable kit medics can carry, with the goal of FDA authorization as early as fiscal 2029. It builds on an earlier DARPA program, FSHARP, in which a team led by the University of Maryland, Baltimore showed that synthetic parts could perform key functions of whole blood. RAPIID also needs fast bedside tests, because a medic has to know what a casualty’s blood is doing before deciding which substitute to give and how much.

CoagCare is meant to be that test. It pairs a compact meter with a single-use card and measures how thick and dense a drop of blood becomes as it clots, tracking the process from the moment a clot forms until it breaks down. Hospital machines that do the same job, known as thromboelastography and thromboelastometry, can take 30 to 60 minutes per test and need laboratory conditions, while CoagCare is designed to work despite the vibration inside ambulances and MEDEVAC helicopters.

“Rapid access to actionable coagulation information can be critical for saving lives in trauma care, when every minute matters,” said Abhishek Ramkumar, founder and CEO of Abram Scientific.

Under the new contract, Abram Scientific will tune CoagCare to guide doses of the blood substitutes being developed under RAPIID and set up production lines for the meter and its test cards. The company will also design a military version for frontline use, and because the military and civilian models take the same disposable card, one factory line can serve both.

Swiss plasma products maker Octapharma led a Series A funding round in Abram Scientific in February to speed up development and help the company apply for FDA 510(k) clearance, which would allow CoagCare to be sold for managing transfusions in civilian trauma and surgery. Abram Scientific holds 17 granted patents on the technology and is working toward that FDA filing while it builds the military version for DARPA.