1. Faculty of Medicine and Health
  2. School of Dentistry
  3. Research and innovation
  4. Translational and clinical research

Translational and clinical research

Digital imaging taken in School of Dentistry Dentcru

The Translation and Clinical Research theme focuses on the delivery of an oral/dental translational research pipeline spanning:

  • Systematic reviews to identify clinical knowledge gaps
  • Early proof of concept, feasibility, pilot studies
  • Phase 3 efficacy and effectiveness trials, often incorporating mechanistic evaluation to advance understanding of how the interventions work
  • Electronic health record data analytics

Our clinical research is focused to improve oral health and bring new innovations into NHS care. We support a broad portfolio spanning caries and dental erosion, dental trauma, paediatrics, pain management, prosthodontics, and links between periodontology and systemic health.

We have established a strong bi-directional knowledge-transfer collaborations between medicine and dental research. These collaborations have extended our portfolio to include:

  • Major diseases with known or emerging links to oral disease; notably, cardiovascular research (VINDICATE MRC), rheumatoid arthritis (CADERA, NIHR-EME £1.13m) and multiple sclerosis (MS-SMART NIHR-EME £2.9m; MS-STAT2 NIHR-HTA £3.84M; MS-OCTOPUS MSS £12.99M; CHARIOT-MS NIHR-EME £2.04M);
  • Antimicrobial stewardship to limit antimicrobial resistance (ALABAMA NIHR-PGfAR £2.5m and APTiTUDE NIHR-DRF);
  • Pain management (Trigeminal neuralgia associated with MS)

These collaborations also afford methodological advancement embracing innovative efficient trial design, operational delivery of large-scale, multi-centre, RCTs, data mining, machine learning analysis and methodological development for electronic health record data analytics and communication including shared decision making to improve patient experience and outcomes.

We deliver research in areas of social deprivation and oral health inequalities, such as HABIT (MRC £145k), BRIGHT trial (NIHR-HTA £1.95m). We drive innovation in dissemination, community engagement and Citizen Science working in partnership with underserved communities.

Members