Every unit of donated blood has a shelf life of 42 days. After that, it gets thrown away. Every year, the United States discards millions of units.
Christopher Caballero wants to give that blood another chance.
ReBlood Rx, which Caballero co-founded in 2023 with Dr. Carlos Munoz, takes expired blood that would otherwise be destroyed and repurposes it into a hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier that doesn’t need refrigeration, doesn’t require blood typing, and can be stored for years.
“Every single time someone donates blood, especially for military service members, that blood has the potential to save a life,” Caballero says. “When that blood expires and gets thrown away, that potential’s gone. So we give that potential right back.”
Caballero and Munoz grew up together. Childhood friends, close enough that Munoz was a regular at the Caballero family house. When it came time for college, they went in different directions. Munoz went to the University of California, San Diego, where he would earn his PhD and spend his academic career researching hemoglobin-based treatments. Caballero went to the United States Military Academy at West Point, studied engineering management, and spent seven years as an Army logistics officer. By the end of his service, he was managing daily operations for 115 personnel and providing logistical support to more than 1,600.
When Caballero left the military, he expected to go work for Amazon or UPS or FedEx. His logistics background pointed him straight toward supply chain operations. Munoz had another idea.
Through his research at UCSD, Munoz had developed a breakthrough in HBOC technology, a field of study dating back to the early 1900s. Previous iterations of hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s, had been derailed by a critical problem: the products caused toxic events in patients. Munoz found a way to manufacture the product that significantly reduced those toxicities, reopening a door that the field had largely closed.
“This technology isn’t necessarily new,” Caballero says. “But what Carlos was able to do is he was able to solve one of the key limitations in the technology that dealt with a lot of the toxicities that were seen in previous iterations.”
Munoz asked his childhood friend if he wanted to help build a company around it. Caballero hesitated. He didn’t know anything about running a company. He didn’t know anything about building one.
“I took the leap of faith because I believed in what the mission stood for,” he says.
The product works for any mammal with hemoglobin. The big-picture vision is human use: military medicine, frontline trauma care, emergency rooms where blood isn’t available. But the path there goes through the veterinary market first. Dogs, it turns out, have a worse blood supply problem than humans do, and the regulatory bar for animal health products is lower and cheaper to clear. Military working dogs and companion animals are the beachhead.
“Proving that out, the regulatory approvals are much lower bars, and quite frankly, a little bit cheaper,” Caballero says. “It’ll allow us to get through those proof of concepts at a smaller level until we get to the humans.”
ReBlood Rx is pre-revenue and pre-clinical, building up the safety studies and preclinical package needed for regulatory approval. But the traction has been accelerating.
At the end of last year, the company was selected as one of 150 out of thousands of applicants for NATO DIANA, the alliance’s defense innovation accelerator. The program, which they completed in June, sent them across Europe to explore how to accelerate adoption of their technology across NATO militaries. Caballero calls it the springboard.
“Things have happened in the last six months at such a higher rate because of that program,” he says. “It really changed the way we’re framing the problem and our take on the solution.”
The company has also recently been awarded Phase I SBIRs and has roughly half a dozen partnerships lined up, from US government entities to veterinary hospital networks ready to buy at scale once the product clears regulatory approval.
The business model is built on the same discipline that shaped Caballero’s Army career: logistics. Rather than manufacturing in one location and distributing globally, ReBlood Rx is pursuing a fabless model, licensing to regional contract manufacturers who can process expired blood locally and distribute within their own area. The approach solves a cost problem and a political one. Nations don’t typically like to exchange blood.
“If you’re using one nation’s expired blood source to provide them a HBOC for their nation, that’s a much more digestible format,” Caballero says.
When asked about the skills that transferred from the military, Caballero points to the basic posture of operating in uncertainty.
“You don’t know what you don’t know 90% of the time when you’re building a company for the first time,” he says. “It’s really trying to find that information, relying on people that are smarter than you. And that’s something that I went through my military career, relying on my NCOs, relying on peers and people to help me along the way.”
He’s quick to credit Munoz, whose previous startup, Ateios Systems, gave the partnership a head start on avoiding common mistakes. And he’s quick to deflect any credit aimed at himself.
“Carlos and I talk about this quite often because we don’t do a lot of bragging or try to self-promote,” he says. “We tend to just tell the truth.”
Outside of work, Caballero and his wife compete in eventing, an equestrian sport, out of Dallas, Texas. They have three horses boarded at a nearby facility. If he’s not behind the computer, he’s out feeding or babysitting a horse.
For a logistics officer who never had this on his bingo card, the mission has turned out to be the same one he signed up for at West Point: keep people alive when the situation gets difficult. The difference is that now the supply chain starts with a bag of expired blood that everyone else was ready to throw away.
Christopher Caballero is the Co-Founder of ReBlood Rx, a biotech company developing hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers from expired donated blood. A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point with a degree in engineering management, Caballero served seven years as an Army logistics officer and is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. He co-founded ReBlood Rx in 2023 with Dr. Carlos Munoz. ReBlood Rx was selected for the NATO DIANA accelerator program and is pursuing regulatory approval in the veterinary market as a pathway to human and military medical applications.