Understanding oral-gut immunological crosstalk in response to Periodontitis

Gum disease sends inflammatory immune cells and bacteria travelling from the mouth down through the digestive tract, altering the gut’s immune balance. This project maps exactly how that happens. Periodontitis affects nearly half of UK adults, yet dentists and gastroenterologists rarely talk to each other. The mouth and gut are treated as separate systems, but recent evidence shows they are immunologically connected—oral inflammation can worsen colitis and other gut disorders. No one has systematically tracked how periodontitis remodels the entire gastrointestinal tract’s immune landscape. The team will use a mouse model of periodontitis, then roll out the whole gut like a carpet for spatial transcriptomics—mapping which genes turn on and off along every centimetre. They will also profile immune cell populations by flow cytometry and visualise collagen networks, mucus barriers, and cytokine pathways using microscopy. The result will be a comprehensive gene and protein atlas of how gum disease disrupts gut homeostasis. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a treatment tomorrow. But it could reframe periodontitis as a systemic disease modifier—one that silently primes the gut for inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease, or colorectal cancer. Understanding that crosstalk opens the door to oral interventions that protect the gut, or gut-directed therapies that calm oral inflammation.