For exploring COVID’s link to oral health, VCU’s Kevin Matthew Byrd wins international honor
By Mackenzie Meleski
School of Dentistry
As the world shut down in 2020 with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kevin Matthew Byrd and a team of researchers asked a crucial question: Does the virus affect the mouth directly, and if so, can saliva spread it?
What started as an online discussion became an intricate global collaboration – with results that are now powering new initiatives at Virginia Commonwealth University. And Byrd, D.D.S, Ph.D., recently received a prestigious international honor: The World Perio Research Award, given only once every three years by Sunstar Foundation, recognized Byrd this year for research exploring the connection between periodontal disease and systemic health.
“This award is a reflection of what’s possible when curiosity, persistence and collaboration align,” said Byrd, who joined VCU’s Philips Institute for Oral Health Research, part of the School of Dentistry, this past December as a full-time faculty member. “I hope it also inspires the next generation of oral health scientists to think big, because the mouth is not separate from the body. It’s part of the airway, part of the immune system, and it belongs at the table in broader biomedical research.”
Upon joining VCU, Byrd founded the Digital Medicine Collaboratory to propel multidisciplinary efforts related to biomedical artificial intelligence and precision medicine. Partners include VCU’s School of Medicine and Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, as well as multiple industry partners, and the goal is to create tools and methods that help scientists better understand how soft tissues of the entire body work, both when they are healthy and diseased. The research starts with the mouth and will expand to other important areas such as the lungs, skin and gut.
As the COVID pandemic arrived, its underlying virus – SARS-CoV-2 – challenged our understanding of how respiratory viruses spread and which tissues were most affected. While much of the early focus centered on the lungs, emerging evidence pointed to the mouth as a potentially important site of infection. Symptoms like dry mouth, loss of taste and oral lesions became common clinical features, raising critical questions about how the virus might interact with oral tissues and whether saliva could serve as a route of transmission.
To better understand how the virus affects the mouth, the researchers studied cells from human salivary glands and gum tissue. They examined over 13,000 individual cells from nine samples and grouped them into 50 cell types.
They ultimately identified 34 types of cells shared between the glands and gums – and found that many of the cells lining these areas, called epithelial cells, had high levels of proteins, such as ACE2 and TMPRSS, that are known to help the virus enter cells. Using additional testing methods, they confirmed that the SARS virus can indeed infect cells in the salivary glands and the tissues of the mouth. They also found new cell types in the glands and gingiva.
The findings were presented in an award-winning paper published in March 2021 – still early in the pandemic’s evolution.
“One of the biggest challenges was the need to move rapidly while ensuring rigor and scientific integrity,” said Byrd, whose research partners included Blake Warner, D.D.S, Ph.D., and others at the National Institutes of Health; Richard Boucher, M.D., and colleagues at the Marsico Lung Institute at the University of North Carolina; and international research partners. “We were trying to answer fundamental questions in real time, with global public health implications.”
Such impactful work continues to drive Byrd, who came to VCU after a decade of research at UNC Chapel Hill and a half-decade at the American Dental Association’s Science & Research Institute. Through his new Digital Medicine Collaboratory at VCU, researchers are using AI and other advanced technologies to study tissues in detail, develop new treatments and better understand cancer and fibrosis.
This strategy is expanding into cancer through the VCU PROSPECTS initiative – Pan-cancer Reconstruction of Spatial Profiles and Therapeutic Targets – where VCU researchers are applying these tools across ovarian, liver, breast, colorectal, lung, and head and neck cancers.
“Our long-term objective is to take a systems biology approach to precision medicine: linking the right drug to the right patient at the right time,” Byrd said.
He traveled to Vienna, Austria, in May for the World Perio Research Award ceremony, which marked a highlight of a career that is now part of VCU’s acclaimed research enterprise.
“It was an incredibly humbling and meaningful moment,” Byrd said. “To be selected by the editors of four of the leading journals in periodontology and dental research was a tremendous honor. This recognition reflects not just the importance of oral-systemic health but the momentum in our field to integrate oral biology into the broader biomedical conversation.”
He also shared credit with those who, amid the world’s fear and uncertainty of COVID, dedicated themselves to lifesaving and pioneering research.
“I’m deeply thankful to every trainee, colleague, and collaborator who contributed to this work,” Byrd said. “Science is a team sport, and none of these accomplishments happen in isolation.”
This story was originally published on the School of Dentistry's website.
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