Grants and Contracts Details
Description
Autologous fat transplantation (AFT) is a common cosmetic and reconstructive procedure
perfonned by plastic surgeons to correct various soft tissue deficiencies of congenital, posttraumatic, or
iatrogenic defects and to rejuvenate faces, hands, or other parts of the body secondary to aging. AFT has
also been used extensively to correct irregularities caused by liposuction for aesthetic improvement of
body contour. However, the main obstacle to achieve long-tenn favorable results of soft tissue
augmentation after AFT is the high rate of absorption in the grafted site, reaching up to 70% of the filled
volume. The high rate of absorption after AFT often necessitates either overcorrection or repeated
procedures in the desired area, causing patient's discomfort, less optimal appearance, dissatisfaction, cost,
and morbidity or trauma ofthe donor site.
Liposuction is the most common cosmetic procedure in the United States and its popularity is
increasing. However, adipose aspirates can only be used for immediate autologous fat grafting during the
same setting of liposuction and at present time, adipose aspirates obtained from the procedure are usually
discarded. It has been a strong desire of both plastic surgeons and patients to preserve the adipose
aspirates for potential future applications.
To the best of our knowledge, there are no successful in vivo studies on the long-tenn preservation
of autogenous fatty tissues for future repeated transplantations. It is our hypothesis that adipose aspirates
obtained from routine cosmetic liposuction could be preserved and stored by means of an optimal
cryopreservation technique for possible future repeated autologous fat transplantations. The overall
objective of this research project is to conduct a subsequent study to detennine whether human fat grafts
cryopreserved by an optimal technique recently developed in our laboratory could survive well in an
animal study and to refine this novel approach for autologous fat transplantations.
The specific aims of the present study are (1) to evaluate a reliable long-tenn preservation protocol
for adipose tissues in an animal model in preparation for future clinical study of autologous fat
transplantations; (2) to improve our understanding of the fundamental cryobiology of adipose tissues.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 7/1/04 → 10/31/05 |
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