To choose appropriate research projects, we seek advice and guidance from the Royal College of Surgeons of England, who provide us with vetted and approved funding opportunities. Projects require unanimous agreement before they are supported by the Trust.

2025. This year we have agreed to fund an application from Mr Kavit Amin of the University Hospital of South Manchester. The project title is Developing New Technology to Preserve Amputated Tissues for Successful Reattachment. The goal of this research is to develop a medical device that can extend the preservation time of amputated tissues from the current limit of hours through to days. This would be achieved by combining advanced dialysis technology with a system that recirculates warm, oxygenated blood through the tissues. Tissue loss following traumatic injury results in significant physical disability, psychological distress, and economic burden. The gold standard treatment for amputated extremities is surgical replantation, but this procedure has a failure rate of up to 20%. Mainly because the time required for surgical reattachment often exceeds the window in which these tissues can tolerate reduced blood supply, leading to irreversible damage. If successful, this research is likely to translate to NHS frontline practice within five years given the technology is already being implemented in solid organ preservation for transplantation (e.g. Organox for liver transplantation).

2023/2024. We provided funding in partnership with The Blond McIndoe Research Foundation to Ms Jessica Roberts at the University of Glasgow for a Surgical Research Fellowship Project in immunobioengineering biomaterials for bone regeneration and reconstruction. Jessica Roberts has spent the past year developing a new human cell model to better understand how the  immune system reacts to bone-regenerating biomaterials. Her findings show that T cells - key immune cells - respond strongly to certain biomaterials, especially those containing proteins like fibronectin or laminin. These immune responses influence how well bone-forming cells behave, which could impact the long-term success of implants. This work was particularly important because it avoids the need for animal testing and provides a new tool for refining materials before they reach clinical trials.

2020 we funded an extended project investigating the immune response to transplanted skin in burn injury which can have a huge impact on scar outcomes and quality of life. The work was carried out by a surgeon setting out on a research career, Daisy Ryan. We funded her for 2 years while she worked at the Department of Burns and Plastic Surgery at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and with the Transplantation Research & Immunology Group at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford.

2012-2016 we sponsored postdoctoral work by Dr. Yella Martin to develop novel systems of delivering skin cells to burn and scald wounds. The motivation for this work was to meet the challenge posed in severely burned patients who have limited areas of healthy skin available to use for skin grafting. We provided long term funding for this work, as it progressed: results were encouraging, papers published and progress shared at conferences every year.