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.
Plug and Play: Towards Anastomosable Vascular Networks
Jason Spector MD
2017
Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University
ASRM/PSF Research Grant
Microsurgery, General Reconstructive
The field of reconstructive surgery aims to replace “like with like”, going so far as to reorganize a person's own muscle, skin, and bone, in order to repair and replace damaged or dysfunctional tissues. Yet, a surgeon is limited by how much tissue is available to reorganize and there is a great need for an off-the-shelf product that can fill in the gaps when there are inadequate or unavailable tissues for reconstruction. Because of this need for living tissue in reconstructive surgery, tissue engineering has for a long time held the promise of “off-the-shelf” organs and tissues that can be grown in a laboratory. Despite this, the field has for a long time been crippled by an inability to properly sustain any large-scale tissues. In the human body, tissues gain sustenance through the circulatory system, and it is the mimicry of this very system that has held such a challenge for the field. Therefore, without adequate circulation of nutrients and removal of waste products, any tissue engineered products will quickly fail and die. Therefore, we have set out to design a product that imitates the way the human body naturally forms blood vessels, by using specific chemical signals on the cells that make up the circulatory system: endothelial cells. Using these chemical signals, we aim to promote these cells to auto-assemble into small blood vessels branching from a larger central channel that we aim to run nutrients through. In this way, we hypothesize that the cells will create complex networks of smaller vessels that can be fed when allowed to automatically connect to the larger central channel that would therefore mimic the natural assembly of blood vessels in human development and represent a significant step forward in creating useful tissue engineered products.
Dr. Jason Spector is a nationally recognized clinician, researcher and educator. He holds two patents, and has been an integral part several Cornell University-Weill Cornell Medical College translational research teams. He participates in the NIH and Howard Hughes Medical Institute sponsored Clinical Summer Immersion for Biomedical Engineering Program, mentoring engineering doctoral students. Since 2007, he has been a lecturer at Cornell University's Biomedical Engineering Science and Technology course, "Approaches to Problems in Human Needs." Dr. Spector serves as an Ad-Hoc reviewer for six prestigious medical journals, and has presented at national and international medical meetings. He recently served as Moderator of the Emerging Technologies Section, at the American Surgical Congress in 2011.