A team of researchers from VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, the VCU School of Dentistry and the University of Pennsylvania recently published a study in Nature Communications examining why some oral inflammatory diseases progress much more rapidly than others.

The study was co-led by Kang I. Ko, D.D.S., Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania; Jinze Liu, Ph.D., of VCU; and Kevin Matthew Byrd, D.D.S., Ph.D., of VCU, with co-first authors Quinn T. Easter, Ph.D., and Khoa L.A. Huynh, Ph.D. The findings identified previously unrecognized changes in blood vessels that may help researchers better understand tissue destruction in oral disease and provide insights relevant to other inflammatory conditions, including cancer.

To conduct this study, the research team used and expanded a tool they created, the Human Periodontal Atlas—the leading periodontal atlas in the world—as part of the wider Human Cell Atlas, a single-cell atlas built from existing publicly available data sets, to examine RNA patterns across different cell types.