Marisol Tellez Merchan
Temple University, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Periodontal disease, a chronic infection and inflammation of the gums and the bone that holds the teeth, is common. It is also hard to predict who will develop it or whose disease will get worse.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
periodontal disease
periodontitis
gum disease
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Build a Medical Continuity of Care Record that pulls up-to-date health measures from the Pennsylvania Health Share Exchange electronic records into dental school care at Temple.
- Develop a machine learning model that predicts the onset and worsening of periodontal disease, using matched medical and dental patient records.
- Test whether a dysbiosis index, a score of how unbalanced the oral bacterial community is, predicts periodontal disease when measured in subgingival plaque and saliva from a cohort of patients followed over time.
- Identify high-resolution metagenomic biomarkers of periodontal disease progression in saliva and plaque, using a nested case-control study that compares patients whose disease did and did not worsen.
More about the research
Risk prediction models already exist, but dentists rarely use them. They perform poorly and leave out important information such as oral bacteria, social and behavioral factors, and an accurate medical history. This project aims to give dental clinics better data and better prediction tools.
Why it matters
Gum disease can lead to tooth loss, and dentists often lack the tools to judge which patients are at highest risk. Combining a patient's current medical information with oral bacteria data could produce prediction models that dental clinics actually use. This could help them spot at-risk patients earlier and focus prevention and disease control on those who need it most. The patient summaries drawn from shared health records could also improve everyday dental care.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alex Valm
University at Albany, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether long filamentous cells at the gum line bring plaque bacteria into contact with gum epithelium to start gingivitis, by imaging intact biofilms on extracted teeth with FISH probes for up to 18 bacterial types.
Edward Steager
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Optimize magnetic control, bacteria-killing activity and tracking of CAR1s, aggregated iron oxide nanoparticle robots, for treating and retrieving root-canal biofilm, testing them in 3D-printed teeth, extracted teeth and pig jaws.
Maxime Cannesson
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop machine learning models that predict major complications after surgery by combining electronic health record data, high-fidelity physiological waveform features, and genomic data.
The school
Temple University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $315M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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