Dear friends,

It gives me great pleasure to invite you as members of our newly created International Society for Plastic Regenerative Surgery (ISPRES). As some of you are already aware, this society was founded at the last IPRAS meeting in Vancouver where I received the honor of becoming its first president.

A basic reason for having a separate body is to emphasize the need to focus and specialize in the regenerative modalities of this niche area.

The last half century was characterized by a leap in almost every field of medicine and in plastic surgery, where necessity, as always, has been the mother of invention. The 70s and 80s has been an era of local and regional flaps. With the 90s microsurgery came to help us find near precise solutions to impossible situations. However, only in the last decade have we started looking beyond duplication and substitution to actually remaking and recreating what age or disease has taken away. The genius in a plastic surgeon has finally found his comfort zone in regenerative surgery.
With stem cell research and its possible applications gaining momentum in every facet of medicine, lipoaspirate has become the most dependable elixir to restore or recreate.

We have always learnt to use our skill in aesthetic surgery as a means to fulfill the aspirations of the patient but we must also recognize the importance of reconstructive surgery which is indeed the “soul” of our specialty. Today this newly found society is an endeavor to amalgamate both for achieving synchronicity in function and form.

The near future will see tremendous progress in the versatility of lipoaspirate to solve many problems, from the simple to the most complex, and we will be fortunate to be a part of this exciting journey.

I therefore appeal to all of you to join the society and empower it with all of your experience, knowledge and skill. Legends in this field such as Tom Biggs, Sydney Coleman, Roger Khouri.... have already laid the path for all who wish to participate in, contribute to and enrich these pages of history.

For all these reasons I also encourage all of you to participate to the first ISPRES Meeting that will be held in Rome on February 2012.

Gino Rigotti

ISPRES President
ISPRES Management Office
Contact Person: Maria Petsa
Email Address: maria.petsa@iprasmanagement.com
Telephone: +30 211 100 1787
Website: www.ispres-ipras.org