American Society of Hirudotherapy

Foundation Partnerships

How foundations and grant funders can partner with the Society to fund open knowledge infrastructure and education — never treatment, cures, or clinical outcomes.

Last Updated: June 2, 2026Reviewed by: ASH Editorial Board
Infrastructure & education — not a clinical claimFoundation-partnership reference

Foundations fund infrastructure and education

The American Society of Hirudotherapy is a nonprofit medical-education society. Foundation grants and major gifts support the infrastructure of an open clinical knowledge platform — verification tooling, public data, translations, governance, gap-mapping, and curriculum. They do not fund clinical outcomes, treatment, or efficacy claims. The Society reports on operational outputs — pages reviewed, citations verified, corrections logged, translations QA'd — never on patient results, which belong to the trials and clinicians we catalogue.

How foundations can partner with us

A foundation can fund a single program, underwrite a defined body of infrastructure work over a grant period, or sponsor the ongoing operating cost of keeping the platform open and audited. Every partnership is structured as a restricted grant tied to a specific program below, with reporting expressed in the program's own operational metrics.

Because the Society publishes its methodology, governance, and correction history openly, a grant officer can review exactly how the work is done — and how it is kept honest — before committing funds, and can audit progress against operational metrics afterward.

Fundable programs

Each program is scoped narrowly and reports against operational governance metrics — never clinical outcomes.

Citation-verification infrastructure

Software and review process that resolves every PMID and DOI against its canonical PubMed/NCBI or DOI record, labels each source's integrity status, and quarantines identifiers that do not resolve.

Operational metrics reported

Citations verified against canonical records
Identifiers labeled (verified / unverified / flagged)
Corrections logged with date and scope

Open-data infrastructure

Free, public, CDN-cached JSON endpoints that expose the Society's registries so external researchers, dashboards, and knowledge-graph projects can reuse the data without an API key.

Operational metrics reported

Public endpoints maintained and documented
Registry records exposed and versioned
Breaking-change notices logged with deprecation windows

Multilingual patient-safety translations

Professional translation and bilingual quality-assurance of safety-and-education content into additional languages, so the same vetted material reaches more readers without drift between locales.

Operational metrics reported

Locales maintained for safety-and-education content
Translation strings QA'd against the source locale
Glossary terms governed for consistency across languages

Governance and transparency

The dashboards, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and editorial-policy machinery that let any partner audit how content is reviewed, who reviewed it, and what changed.

Operational metrics reported

Pages reviewed and review dates recorded
Conflict-of-interest disclosures published
Operational metrics surfaced on the governance dashboard

Research-gap mapping

Cataloguing where the published evidence is thin, absent, or investigational across conditions and compounds, so the map of what is and is not studied is explicit rather than implied.

Operational metrics reported

Conditions and compounds catalogued by evidence framing
Investigational areas labeled rather than overstated
Evidence-tier framing recorded per registry entry

Educational curriculum

Open, citation-backed educational modules and reference material for clinicians and the public — structured as education, not as medical advice or treatment recommendations.

Operational metrics reported

Educational modules published and dated
Modules linked to verified source citations
Review cycles completed per module

What a foundation grant explicitly does NOT support

  • Any claim of clinical efficacy, treatment outcome, or cure.
  • Statements that hirudotherapy treats, prevents, or improves any condition.
  • Patient-facing medical advice or recommendations of any kind.
  • Marketing of products, procedures, or providers.
  • Outcome-based metrics such as patients helped, limbs saved, or infections avoided.

Operational output, by the numbers

Current operational figures a foundation grant reports against — not clinical results.

Live operational figures — not audited financials

These are current operational counts, consistent with the live governance dashboard and corrections log. They are operational metrics, not audited financial statements.

9,902

Verified citations

Identifiers re-checked against the canonical record (PubMed / DOI)

10,030

Research artifacts indexed

Studies, conditions, compounds, and RCTs in the structured library

4

Locales published

English, Russian, Spanish, German — full-site parity

Live

Public correction log

Every correction is dated and recorded in the public log

Grant readiness

What a foundation needs to diligence a grant — transparency, methodology, and a conflict-of-interest policy — is published, not promised.

Published methodology

How content is sourced, reviewed, and corrected is documented openly, so a grant officer can see the process before funding it.

Transparent governance

Review dates, reviewers, and operational metrics are surfaced on the governance dashboard rather than asserted in prose.

Conflict-of-interest policy

Sponsorship and donation boundaries are written down, including a firewall between funding and editorial conclusions.

Restricted-fund accounting

Grants can be designated to a specific program and tracked separately, with reporting on operational outputs rather than clinical results.

How we keep this honest

Restricted use

Grant funds are designated to a named program, tracked separately, and applied only to that infrastructure or education work. We report on operational outputs — pages reviewed, citations verified, corrections logged, translations QA'd — never on clinical outcomes.

Editorial firewall

Funding a program never buys influence over editorial conclusions. The conflict-of-interest policy keeps the line between support and content explicit, and review history is published so any partner can audit what changed and when.

Partner with us

Start a foundation conversation

To discuss a foundation grant or a multi-year infrastructure partnership, contact the Society directly. We can share the published methodology, governance dashboard, and conflict-of-interest policy, and scope a restricted grant against a specific program and its operational metrics.

This website provides educational information and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment recommendations. Medicinal leech therapy carries clinically meaningful risks and should be performed only by qualified clinicians under institutionally approved protocols. FDA 510(k) clearance for medicinal leeches is limited to specific indications; investigational and off-label discussions are labeled accordingly. For patient-specific guidance, consult a qualified healthcare provider.