Research
The Institute works where oral health science meets the health of the whole body: the microbiome, preventive oral health, and periomedicine. Each theme states it’s rationale, it’s gaps, and where the Institute puts its effort.
Microbiome
Scientific Rationale
The oral cavity hosts one of the most diverse microbial communities in the body, and its balance shapes far more than oral disease. Shifts in the oral microbiome are implicated in systemic inflammation, metabolic disorders and cardiovascular risk, yet the mechanisms remain incompletely mapped. Understanding this ecology underpins everything else the institute does.
Current Gaps
Most microbiome research treats the mouth and the gut as separate worlds. Longitudinal data linking oral microbial shifts to systemic outcomes are scarce, and clinical practice has few validated markers to act on.
Institute Focus
Mapping the oral-systemic microbial axis and identifying the markers professionals can act on in everyday prevention.
Oral Health Science
Scientific Rationale
Caries and periodontal disease remain among the most widespread chronic conditions in the world, and both are largely preventable. The science of prevention is mature in parts and surprisingly thin in others, and it underpins every claim the field makes to medicine.
Current Gaps
Prevention . research is fragmented across dentistry’s subfields, and little of it is expressed in terms physicians and nutritionists can use. Evidence on behavior change in daily oral care is especially thin.
Institute Focus
Consolidating the evidence base for preventive oral care and expressing it in the language of general health practice.
Periomedicine
Scientific Rationale
The link between periodontal disease and systemic conditions, among them diabetes, cardiovascular disease and adverse pregnancy outcomes, is one of the best documented in modern medicine, and one of the lease acted upon. Periomedicine is where that evidence meets clinical practice.
Current Gaps
Care pathways between dentistry and medicine barely exist. Screening in either direction is rare, and shared clinical guidelines are the exception rather than the rule.
Institute Focus
Building the case, and the tools, for dentistry and medicine to treat the patient as one system.
Each of these themes is led and reviewed by the Institute’s experts.