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During NIDR’s first decade, most funding went to intramural research. But from 1956 to 1957 Congress almost tripled the NIDR budget, enabling the institute to scale up its extramural program from 114 to more than 300 projects. For the first time, extramural funding included training grants and covered broad disciplines including pathology, bacteriology, and epidemiology.
Rena D'Souza, a specialist in craniofacial development and regenerative medicine, became Director of NIDCR in 2020. An early initiative was promoting the Surgeon General's report Oral Health in America. D'Souza steered NIDCR through the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2023 oversaw the launch of PRIMED, AHEAD, and IMPACT, innovative programs to boost practice-based research in dental schools, fight TMD, and battle head and neck cancer.
In April, the NIDCR Salivary Disorders Unit under Dr. Blake Warner, teaming with many other institutions, launched a study on the role of the oral cavity in the spread and transmission of COVID-19. By September, the study had determined that saliva testing was as effective as nasal swabs, the viral load in saliva correlated with loss of taste in COVID patients, and that masking minimized transmission.
During the 1990s intramural researcher Bruce Baum turned insights from gene therapy into a treatment for dry mouth caused by radiation treatment. Baum and John Chiorini produced an adenovirus vector for introducing a water-producing gene into salivary glands. After successful 2008 clinical trials, Chiorini took the therapy through FDA safety trials. Baum's team published in late 2012. Read more in the NIH Catalyst.
