Grant: Team Grant: Bone Health

Periodontal diseases also known as "Gum Disease" are the most common inflammatory/destructive conditions of bone and affects up to 80 percent of the North American population during their lifetime. In addition to the financial burden (4 billion dollars per year in Canada alone), new evidence indicates that periodontal diseases also impact systemic health. While current therapies provide improved outcomes, our ability to diagnose these osteoimmunologic diseases prior to the onset of bone destruction is very limited. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to accurately define the various periodontal diseases, their risk/outcome determinants and to translate this knowledge into diagnostic tools and therapeutics that can control bone loss and reduce the socioeconomic burden. To address these challenges, we have assembled a health research team with specific expertise in macrophage and bone biology and with cutting-edge technologies including high-throughput mass spectrometry and biomarkers of oral disease. We will synergize our activities to characterize the circulating and tissue monocyte/macrophage phenotypes, and the cytokine, chemokine and terminally-modified cytokine profiles of human subjects with periodontal diseases. We will use these data to develop diagnostic and prognostic signatures for these high prevalence, bone-destructive diseases. We will determine whether modified cytokines/chemokines are key elements that regulate bone loss in these high prevalence bone diseases. An improved understanding of these processes will enable early diagnoses and prevent bone loss. The data emerging from these studies will elucidate diagnostic/prognostic markers and new therapeutic targets that are required to maintain bone health in patients with periodontal diseases and possibly other less prevalent and therefore more difficult to study osteoimmunologic diseases.