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.
Prevention of Chronic Rejection in Composite Tissue Allograft
Jignesh Unadkat MD
2007
University of Pittsburgh
Basic Research Grant
Composite Tissue Allotransplantation
Over 2 million limb amputees need prosthesis or reconstruction in the United States each year (Langer R, Science 1993). Initial concerns regarding the risk-benefit ratio of non-life-sustaining transplants such as composite tissue allograft (CTA) as a reconstructive option have been partially circumvented by the initial results of human hand transplantations. Chronic rejection (CR) is the most significant cause for solid organ loss following transplantation burdening the healthcare with $300,000 per re-transplant per organ (Kasiske B, JAMA 2000). Besides the myriad of side effects, current immunosuppressants cannot prevent CR. A similar occurrence in CTA cannot be ignored. However, there is no data or description of CR in a CT A. Due to this, the current clinical hand transplant patients are being monitored with great caution. With current lack of knowledge of CR in CT A, it would not be possible to predict the long-term outcome of such transplants precluding their routine use for reconstruction. In this study, we propose to create the first model of CR in CTA enabling the precise recognition of mechanism and pathology of CR. Following this; we would assess safe, drug-based strategies to prevent CR that would fuel preclinical studies before being implemented in clinical CTA.