Grants We Funded
Grant applicants for the 2023 cycle requested a total of nearly $4 million dollars. The PSF Study Section Subcommittees of Basic & Translational Research and Clinical Research evaluated nearly 140 grant applications on the following topics:
The PSF awarded research grants totaling over $1 million dollars to support nearly 30 plastic surgery research proposals.
ASPS/PSF leadership is committed to continuing to provide high levels of investigator-initiated research support to ensure that plastic surgeons have the needed research resources to be pioneers and innovators in advancing the practice of medicine.
Research Abstracts
Search The PSF database to have easy access to full-text grant abstracts from past PSF-funded research projects 2003 to present. All abstracts are the work of the Principal Investigators and were retrieved from their PSF grant applications. Several different filters may be applied to locate abstracts specific to a particular focus area or PSF funding mechanism.
Osteogenesis in ASCs By Co-Culture with Infant Dura
Darren Smith MD
2006
Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
Basic Research Grant
Cranio/Maxillofacial/Head and Neck
Pediatric craniofacial surgery is complicated by a shortage of autologous bone for grafting in the repair of osseous defects after trauma or congenital anomaly reconstruction. In the pediatric population, because of an under-developed diploic space, local calvarial bone graft sources are non-existent, and distant sources are limited by practical concerns ranging from donor site morbidity to low tissue yield. Infants, however, benefit from highly osteoinductive dura mater, and can spontaneously heal large calvarial defects. It is in this context of a shortage of bone graft material for craniofacial reconstruction that the objective of this project is to create a new source of osteoprogenitor cells by utilizing the osteoinductive potential of infant dura mater. We hypothesize that the co-culture of adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) with infant dura mater-derived cells will yield enhanced and accelerated osteoblastic differentiation of the ASCs, as infant dura is likely "programmed" to produce the signaling molecules required for the maintenance of an ideal osteoinductive microenvironment. Confirming this hypothesis would allow craniofacial surgeons to use readily available adipose derived stem cells as an alternative to autologous bone grafts for the reconstruction of bone defects in the pediatric craniofacial skeleton.