Dental school wins largest grant ever

The Goldman School of Dental Medicine won the largest grant ever given to Boston University Medical Campus to help low-income Bostonians get better care.
The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, which is part of the prestigious National Institutes of Health, awarded the $14.5 million grant to the Center for Research to Evaluate and Eliminate Dental Disparities. The center studies underserved populations in Boston to find new ways to improve low-income residents’ dental health. The grant will fund CREEDD until 2015.
‘It’s a real validation that we’ve been doing the right thing for the past seven years and an endorsement by both our peers . . . and by NIH,’ BU health policy department chairman Raul Garcia said. ‘The science we were composing was good science that has the potential to really make a difference in people’s lives.’
The Goldman School named Garcia CREEDD’s principal investigator alongside Michelle Henshaw, the Community Partnerships assistant dean.
CREEDD was founded by the NIDCR and National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities in 2001. This year’s grant was received to provide continued research and development at CREEDD to improve the oral health of disadvantaged communities, according to a press release.
‘It’s great validation of our past success and great encouragement to keep doing the work that our team has been doing,’ Garcia said. ‘The primary purpose is to support the costs, personnel and all auxiliary expenses of doing major, randomized control trials in communities.’
One study examines the dental health of families living in Boston public housing who have young children. Another looks at data from routine pediatric visits. With this new funding, CREEDD will be able to conduct clinical and translational research in these communities, as well as train researchers to learn more about these particularly vulnerable social and ethnic groups in New England.
Garcia said he sees this grant as a major accomplishment because it supports the studies for seven years instead of the five year NIH typically provides.
‘The particular value of having a seven-year period as opposed to a five-year period, or shorter, is that the amount of work we need to do is going to take that long,’ he said. ‘These are not short and simple studies. They will be very complicated community-based trials.’
In addition to the Goldman School’s grant, NIH funded similar institutions at the University of Colorado Denver and the University of California San Francisco. These two centers and CREEDD make up a national network of health disparity centers that focus primarily on children’s dental diseases, Garcia said.’
Though this particular grant was the largest in the school’s history, other sizable amounts have been awarded to the Goldman School in the past. The Northeast Center for Research to Reduce Oral Health Disparities received a grant for $11,846,846 in 2001, Goldman School spokeswoman Laura Mackin said.