The Airlift Research Foundation, a relatively new Shadyside-based charitable, public foundation, will honor America's soldiers shortly after Veterans Day by awarding grants to fund research into improvements in the care, treatment and rehabilitation of traumatic limb injury received on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The awards, open to researchers everywhere, will be the foundation's first of what it plans to be two annual presentations of two-year grants of $200,000 each to fund research into traumatic limb injuries from the wars.

The grants are viewed as seed money so the researchers who receive them can leverage more research funds from such agencies such as the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Defense.

Such research is needed, the foundation said, because 82 percent of all war injuries in Afghanistan and Iraq involve extremities. The wars have produced such wounds never before seen in such quantity because most are caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs).

While severely wounded, soldiers are surviving such blasts more so than in the past because of improved body armor, improved battlefield medical care and quick airlifts to hospitals.

Formed last year, the foundation's mission is "to fund orthopaedic research, increase public awareness of traumatic war injuries to military and civilian survivors worldwide, and collaborate with other groups that have similar interests."

"It's very exciting," foundation President Susan Pressly Lephart said of her group. "I have great passion for my work and the difference we really hope to make.

"Our hope is that we're able to fund translational research that is going to have impact in improved care in the next five-year period in these types of injuries," Dr. Lephart said. "The long-term effect is it would improve care for all trauma victims worldwide, such as those injured in car wrecks.

"Even though blast injuries are unique, there is a lot of science that will help and improve care for all types of trauma in these types of injuries."

Airlift's development director Bill Lucas said the foundation is looking for scientific research applications for projects that address the protection of limbs, treatment of traumatic orthopaedic injuries in the field, rehabilitation and quality of life. The goal is to produce results in five years that would immediately benefit military personnel and later be applicable to civilian victims of limb trauma from car and industrial accidents, for example.

"We want to find ways to stem infection, to salvage limbs so there is still mobility and quality of life so it doesn't lead to amputation. And if there is amputation, so that there is better quality of care to the residual limb," Mr. Lucas said.

"One hot topic is regeneration, to see if it's possible to regenerate bone tissue and soft tissue, to see if it's able to regrow them."

The Airlift Research Foundation is an outgrowth of the former Aircast Foundation, a Summit, N.J.-headquartered corporate foundation founded by the late Glenn Johnson Jr., the inventor of the inflatable aircast, akin to a brace for injuries such as ankle sprains, that promotes orthopaedic healing and allows injured persons to function.

As for the foundation, Mr. Johnson's goal was help young investigators, clinicians and scientists by providing seed money for research in the field of orthopaedics, according to the foundation's Web site.

He wanted a separation between the company and the foundation, which is how it came to be based in Pittsburgh. Dr. Lephart, who earned a Ph.D. in exercise physiology and sports medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, was based here as an Aircast sales representative for Pennsylvania and West Virginia. She was named head of the Aircast Foundation and originally ran it out of her Penn Hills home before the office was moved to Shadyside.

She said that Pittsburgh was a natural fit for such a foundation because of its reputation as a center for research. Dr. Freddie Fu, chairman of UPMCs Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, and Dr. Savio L-Y. Woo, Director UPMC's Musculoskeletal Research Center, were initially on the foundation's scientific advisory board.

The Aircast Foundation has awarded 40 grants totaling $3.9 million to 30 academic institutions in 17 states since 1996. Grantees subsequently received $36.8 million in other funding, including $29 million from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense, leveraging by nearly 10 times the original funds invested by the foundation, according to the foundation's Web site.

The company was sold earlier this decade, and discussions were held to determine what to do with the corporate foundation's funds. It was decided to form a public, nonprofit charitable foundation in 2008, narrowing its mission to funding research into traumatic limb injuries from the wars. It funding now comes from donations and grants from corporations, foundations, the government and the public.

"Eventually what we would like to do is to have a symposium to bring everyone together," Mr. Lucas said, "to be a one-stop shop, so to speak, as a resource for the research community as well as the general public and those suffering limb trauma to see what research is being done.

"We want to put it into applicable terms how the research is affecting what's happening on the battlefield to what kind of everyday applications it can have, to see how it can be translated from the petri dish and very basic science to how it can be used on the battlefield or in the operating room."

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