Does Seed Funding by the Plastic Surgery Foundation Progress to National Institutes of Health Grants? An Analysis of 20 Years of Funded Grants.

Background: One of the goals of the Plastic Surgery Foundation (PSF) is to initiate a pathway by which researchers can develop national extramurally-funded grants. The present study investigates the effectiveness of seed PSF grants in aiding researchers to obtain grant funding through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Methods: The NIH RePORTER database was queried with the names of all American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) members. PSF Pilot grants and Research Fellowships were defined as “PSF seed funding.” To obtain the information regarding the PSF grants, all grants that were funded from 2003 to 2023 were manually extracted from the website. The Principal Investigators that had both PSF and NIH grants were identified and further analyzed Results: 427 unique individuals earned a PSF grant, and 54 unique individuals earned a NIH grant related to plastic surgery. Of those who attained PSF grant funding, 25 (5.9%) attained both a PSF and NIH grant; these individuals were awarded 53 NIH grants and 56 PSF grants. Only 11 (2.6%) PSF grant recipients received a PSF grant prior to attaining NIH grant funding. Of the 49 PSF Research Fellowship recipients, only 2 (4.1%) later received a NIH grant. Conclusion: The PSF provides the most seed grant funding in plastic surgery outside of the NIH. However, transition from PSF seed grants to NIH funding remains low. Additional work to understand PSF grant conversion to other important sources of funding, to include Department of Defense, Veterans Administration, and Foundation grants is needed.