The Plastic Surgery Foundation
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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.

Endogenous Tissue Engineering of Custom Mandible Free Flaps

Principal Investigator
Deniz Sarhaddi MD

Year
2011

Institution
University of Michigan

Funding Mechanism


Focus Area


Abstract
Critical size bony defects of the mandible remain a complex surgical challenge for plastic and reconstructive surgeons. Although vascularized bone flaps can provide enough bone to repair such defects, the associated donor site morbidity remains a challenging problem which surgeons have not been able to circumvent. The possibility of creating vascularized bone flaps with ‘endogenous tissue engineering' techniques has the potential to provide large sized bone flaps with minimal donor site morbidity. Tissue transformation, performed by treating skeletal muscle flaps with osteogenic factors, has the potential to transform muscle flaps into custom shaped vascularized bone flaps for reconstruction of critical size mandible defects in vivo. The conversion of “expendable” skeletal muscles into bony flaps is a way to circumvent the morbidity associated with the harvest of autologous vascularized bone flaps for mandible reconstruction. However, this technology has not been further sophisticated and the characteristics of the bone produced have not been fully analyzed. We hypothesize that skeletal muscle can be transformed into high quality mandible-shaped vascularized bone flaps in vivo with the use of osteogenic factors and bone growth enhancement drugs. The possibility of creating a mandible-shaped vascularized bone flap from autologous muscle flaps in vivo with FDA approved osteogenic factors (BMP-2) and vascularity enhancement drugs (Deferoxamine) can potentially revolutionize the source of bone flaps for reconstruction of critical size mandible defects.