How expensive would it take to invent, make and administer artificial blood transfusions?

If it were easy, it would’ve been done – there’s lots of money to be made. There are many options for blood volume expanders, but no good oxygen-carrying blood substitutes.

(We used to use Oxyglobin until it went off the market.)

To answer both questions: extremely expensive to make good ones (billions?) and no, they are not currently a good alternative. Theoretically, they would be amazing due to the constant blood shortage, but alas…

My understanding is that they have been invented, made and administered (several varieties, apparently) but that haven’t been particularly safe. From what I could gather from reading some review articles on pubmed (here’s an example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2728196/) artificial blood products have been developed but are associated with greater adverse reactions (especially cardiovascular) and have not been proven to decrease mortality (which would be the point). Further research seems to be occurring on the topic (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20392662) but I didn’t find any “breakthroughs” per se.

However, I am not a scientist so my understanding of the second article especially is somewhat limited. I’m not sure what prompted your interest, but it’s an interesting question!

Since there are often blood shortages, especially in disasters, a manufactured artificial blood supply would be very well accepted if safe, reliable, and inexpensive. Even donated blood is not cheap to collect, process, handle, and distribute. So I’d say it’s not cheap, and since cost has never deterred medical manufacturing, it isn’t reliable.

Nothing that will be as widely used as artificial blood transfusions will be cheap to have approved by the FDA, as the use of such a product would be very wide and the risks involved with failure are quite severe. Because of this, it is more than likely that a fully artificial blood substitute will never be made, or if one is made it will not be for the purposes of transfusion.
A better and more likely solution to blood shortages that is much closer to the massive scale and availability required to meet the needs of large-scale transfusion is the expansion of hematopoietic stem cells, which are the cells which give rise to red blood cells. There are investigators currently working on engineering these cells to make RBC’s with special properties which allow them to carry therapeutic proteins, drugs, etc. (see the work of Harvey Lodish, MIT) but scaling up unmodified versions of these cells could be done. That said, there are a lot of challenges associated with this, and also a lot of very smart people working very hard on it.