Interesting projects are taking place at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine (RSDM) http://sdm.rutgers.edu. Researchers are working on the idea that possibly dentistry and oral healthcare could yield potential treatments for systemic diseases such as leukemia, tuberculosis, and MERS.
Major research in this field is taking place at RSDM’s Center for Oral Infectious Diseases http://sdm.rutgers.edu/research/center where researchers are exploring how bacteria drawn from the oral cavity can be used to eliminate toxins that attack the body’s immune system.
The Center in FY 2014 and 2015 received three grants from NIH www.nih.gov and one from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) www.darpa.mil to pinpoint organisms found in the mouth and use them as the basis for broader research that could possibly provide treatments for mucosal infections.
Researchers at RSDM’s Center for Temporomandibular Disorders and OrofacialPain http://sdm.rutgers.edu/departments/diagnostic_pre/orofacial-pain.html are examining how the pain system copes under chronic conditions. So far, the Center has successfully recognized certain clinical phenotypes or clusters of symptoms to help improve diagnosis and treatment.
In the past two years, the Center has been conducting studies on how the body processes pain and is experimenting with topical analgesics and other methods to treat pain. In addition, researchers have patented medical technologies to treat pain and have worked closely on clinical trials for Colgate-Palmolive www.colgatepalmolive.com with other companies.