Evaluation of Cryopreserved Human Fat Grafts after Tranplantation

  • Pu, Lee (PI)

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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.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date7/1/0410/31/05

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