Grants Funded
Grant applicants for the 2024 cycle requested a total of nearly $3 million dollars. The PSF Study Section Subcommittees of Basic & Translational Research and Clinical Research evaluated more than 100 grant applications on the following topics:
The PSF awarded research grants totaling over $650,000 dollars to support more than 20 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.
Tissue Engineered Biocompatible Tendon/Ligament-Bone Constructs
Simon Farnebo MD, PhD
2012
Stanford University
National Endowment for Plastic Surgery Grant
Hand or Upper Extremity, Tissue Engineering
Injuries to the upper extremities that involve tendons and ligaments are very common. Many of these injuries, including for example a sprained wrist, heal with no special treatment. However, injuries that cause the tendon or ligament insertion to tear off its bony attachment often needs surgical treatment. A good result after surgical reconstruction of this insertion part is however hard to accomplish since it typically heals as a fibrous scar which looses its former strong properties. New ruptures and poor function may be the post operative result. We hypothesize that we can create a stronger healing if we can replace the old injured insertion point with a "spare part" construct, based on the patients own cells. This is called tissue-engineering. New tissue, in this case tendon and its insertion into bone, are developed by culturing multipotent stem cells on a scaffold that is used as a skeleton for the cells. To test our hypothesis, and to optimize the conditions for our cells to populate these constructs by adding growth factors, we will work in an animal model of tendon insertion healing in the rat foot. The ultimate, long term goal with this project is a translation of these techniques to the production of human tendon/ligament - bone insertion constructs that can be clinically used in reconstruction of extremity injuries.
Simon Farnebo, MD, PhD is a fully-trained Swedish hand surgeon with special interest in microsurgery. He currently upholds a Consultant (Attending) position at the Department of Plastic Surgery, Hand Surgery and Burns, Linköping University Hospital, Sweden. He wrote his doctoral thesis (PhD, 2010) on developing a new technique for microvascular monitoring in hand surgery, using microdialysis. (On microvascular blood flow assessments with the new microdialysis urea clearance technique). As of August 2012, Dr. Farnebo is a postdoctoral scholar at the Division for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Stanford University sponsored by the Fulbright Commission as well as the Swedish Research Council. His project is directed towards studies on flexor tendon tissue engineering with special regard to the tendon bone insertion in the hand, with James Chang, MD as Principal Investigator.