Dear visitor to this JJAMD site.

You are among a valued group of people who have provided resources, advice and interest, or have made generous donations in support of the Milton and Renée Glass Family Fellowship in TMJD Research at the Forsyth Institute.  We thank you for your support.

The Fellowship has been enabled, and we wanted to provide you with this brief report on the status of the research.

The Fellow selected for this position, Dr. Lin Xu, MD, Ph.D, was chosen from a total of 33 candidates who expressed interest in the Fellowship.  Dr. Xu comes with excellent professional credentials, and some impressive experience in TMJD research.  Dr. Xu began at Forsyth on October 1, and, as they say, has hit the ground running.  She has the support of mentoring from Forsyths research faculty, and has access to all of Forsyths research services.

Dr. Xus immediate goal is to establish an animal model with the intent of documenting the actual development of the temporomandibular joints in this model.  She states persuasively, and we wholeheartedly agree, that the field needs concrete information about how the Temporomandibular joints and the disorders to them (TMJD) develop before we can look to defining an effective treatment and perhaps even prevention of the disease.  She has begun preliminary experiments along these lines, and we wait with great anticipation for the early results of her work.

The Steering Committee for this Fellowship has noted that a small cluster of research efforts in TMJD seem to have developed right here in the Boston area since we undertook to establish this Fellowship.   To encourage as much collaboration as possible, we are seeking to structure a seminar program early in 2007 to bring all those scientists involved in rigorous TMJD research to Forsyth to discuss their research with an assembly of their scientific peers.  This cross-fertilization of one discipline with another will help ensure that research based on solid scientific principles will advance along  several fronts simultaneously.

We hope this brief report will reinforce for you the importance of healthy jaw joints to whole body health, and that your support already has yielded a critical step in the efforts to understand and manage TMJD.  Although one would hope ideally that research will produce an ultimate cure immediately, we know that it will take time and innovative, creative, heretofore uninvestigated areas of research to bring us to the final goal.

Milton and Renée have reemphasized their 25-year mission as health advocates by looking to the health of children first with a passion for prevention and wellness in people of all ages.  We hope that you will help by providing an initial gift or additional funding toward a goal of making this Fellowship self-sustaining in the years ahead.

Sincerely yours,

Dominick P. DePaola, DDS, PhD    

President     

Richard Pharo, ScD

Chair of the Fellowship Committee