Robert L. Cucin, MD, FACS, Sponsor:

I'm a practicing plastic surgeon and a diplomat of both the American Board of Surgery and the American Board of Plastic Surgery.  I received my BA and MD from Cornell, an MBA from Columbia, and a JD from Fordham Law School.  

I've been involved in medical research since medical school, authored over two dozen contributions to the literature, and am an inventor holding 15 patents. 

As a pioneer in power assisted liposuction, I've spent the last 13 years studying fat - it's metabolism, pathology, and methods for its removal, processing, and autografting.  

Broad Impact:

We now know that the gentler-by-design "tube-within-a-tube" power assisted liposuction platform I developed can do more than safely remove large enough volumes of fat to reduce the waist-to-hips ratio (WHR) of patients with metabolic syndrome and improve their metabolic state.  I have discovered that it also can be adapted to the safe removal of visceral ("belly") fat - laparoscopically using my company's patent-protected Endoscopic Visceral Liposuction (EVL) technology and be rapidly developed.  

This new approach is very significant and exciting because it is free of the complications and sequelae presented by current popular bariatric treatments of obesity, involving gastric bypass or restrictive surgery.  Also, the literature suggests that directly removing visceral fat will have a "multiplier effect" resulting in the loss of body fat, the reversal of the deleterious metabolic effects of that fat, lowering insulin resistance and the tendency to type 2 diabetes, and "unlatching" patients from their obese, depressed metabolic homeostasis.

Campaign Goal:

This campaign is to fund the rapid development, prototyping, and preliminary testing of a this important and novel endoscopic device for for the safe removal of visceral fat as this method and device may benefit 1.3 billion people around the globe and help reduce the $350 billion/year expenditure on obesity-related disease.