Why Attend
This is the first-ever event solely dedicated to the oral microbiome. At Microbiome Connect: Oral, attendees will learn the latest scientific & academic research on the role that the microbes in your mouth have on human health and disease with leading academics such as Marcelo Freire, Associate Professor J. Craig Venter Institute, Purnima Kumar, Professor, Ohio State University, and many more.
The event will delve into study details of periodontal & systematic disease, caries, pre-and-pro biotics, personalized oral care diseases, and arginine's role on the oral microbiome with Dr Maria Ryan, Chief Clinical Officer at Colgate-Palmolive.
Meet innovative start-ups like Danny Grannick, CEO & Founder of Bristle Health, Brian Klein, BrickBuild Therapeutics and Mark Burhene, Ask The Dentist, who are driving cutting-edge research and technological product advancements in oral care.
Whether it's finding a new funding lead for your oral microbiology research, connecting with the industry for oral-related product propositions, or perhaps you are just interested in learning more about the oral microbiome. If you are responsible or involved in oral health, this is for you.
browse our leading microbiome speakers

Marcelo Freire

Jens Kreth

Purnima Kumar

Dr. Maria Ryan
Maria Emanuel Ryan, DDS, Ph.D. is Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer at the Colgate-Palmolive Company where she provides oversight and leadership to dental and dermal clinical organizations, knowledge management, scientific communications, biosolutions, and methods development teams.
Dr. Ryan previously served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Oral Biology and Pathology at Stony Brook University where she was actively involved in teaching, clinical practice, and research.
She is the Past President of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR) and has served on many academic and foundation boards.
Dr. Ryan has received numerous awards including NIH National Research Service Awards and a Physician-Scientist Award. She was the recipient of the New Dentist Leadership Award from the Dental Society of the State of New York and received an achievement award from the American Dental Association. Dr. Ryan was the first recipient of the Victress Health Award which she received in Berlin, Germany in 2010 to recognize her educational and research efforts in the area of women’s health.
Dr. Ryan is a Distinguished Alumnus of Stony Brook’s School of Dental Medicine and was a Fellow of the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program for Women at Drexel University College of Medicine.
Dr. Ryan is a nationally and internationally known speaker and author who has appeared on multiple media outlets to discuss the role of the dental professional in the provision of optimal overall health care.

Ana Duran-Pinedo

Dana Graves

Mircea Podar

George Chen

Katrine Whiteson (VIRTUAL)

Yvonne Kapila

Jorge Frias-Lopez

Braden Tierney

Gill Diamond

Maria Dzunkova

Nezar Al-hebshi

Brian Klein

LaTonya Kilpatrick
LaTonya Kilpatrick-Liverman leads the Early Research Oral Care, Devices, and Clinical Methods group at Colgate Palmolive Co. She and her Team are responsible for exploring current and emerging technologies in biological and related interdisciplinary sciences to assess wellness states and develop targeted and personalized solutions to improve overall health. Her Team is also responsible for developing advanced therapies and devices to prevent disease and improve and monitor health.
LaTonya has over 30 years of experience conducting research in skin and oral biology. She is the author of several patents, book chapters, and journal articles, and has served on the Editorial Advisory Board of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Industrial Advisory Board at Rutgers University, and on the Biomaterials Symposium Advisory Board at Rutgers University.
LaTonya has volunteered in a number of education based outreach programs sponsored by Colgate Palmolive, the American Chemical Society, and various community groups. She finds joy leveraging every opportunity to give back and share her experiences.
LaTonya joined the Colgate Piscataway GTC in 1992. She holds a BA degree in Chemistry from Hampton University and a PhD degree in Chemistry from Princeton University.

Mark Burhenne

Flavia Teles

Dr. Robert Burne (VIRTUAL)
Robert A. Burne earned his Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from the Pennsylvania State University and his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Rochester (UR).
After a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship, he served for 10 years on the faculty of UR’s School of Medicine and Dentistry. He moved to the University of Florida College of Dentistry (UFCD) in 2001, where he served as Chair of the Department of Oral Biology for 18 years and as Program Director of UFCD’s NIDCR-funded Comprehensive Training Program in Oral Biology for over 12 years.
He is presently a Distinguished Professor of the Department of Oral Biology, after stepping down from his 10-year role as the Associate Dean for Research in 2020, and the Louis and Marge Atkins Endowed Professor.
Dr. Burne’s research is aimed at dissecting molecular mechanisms governing the ability of bacteria that colonize the human oral cavity to modulate gene expression in response to environmental inputs.
He is internationally recognized for his work with Streptococcus mutans and other oral streptococci; making seminal contributions to understanding the regulation of carbohydrate metabolism, stress tolerance, and intercellular communication by oral streptococci.
He has published ~200 peer-reviewed articles on these topics, as well as on the genetics, physiology, and ecology of oral biofilms, and on novel probiotic mechanisms used by beneficial bacteria to promote health in the oral microbiome.
Over 150 students, postdoctoral fellows, clinician-scientists, and international fellows have received training in his laboratory. He received the IADR Gies and IADR Hatton Awards as a Ph.D. student and the IADR’s Distinguished Scientist Award for Research in Dental Caries in 2009. Dr. Burne is currently a Fellow and Member-at-Large of the AAAS.

Alex Mira (VIRTUAL)
Alex Mira obtained an honour distinction for his BSc in Biology at the University of Alicante, Spain, in 1994. He then obtained a British Council scholarship to do a Master of Science degree at Oxford University (UK) and was the first Spanish student to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship, which allowed him to do his doctorate at Oxford on bacterial genetics, which he finished in 1999.
He then was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to carry out post-doctoral research in the USA in the field of bacterial genomics for 2 and a half years, and a second post-doc at Uppsala University (Sweden) working on microarray technology and bioinformatics.
After 9 years abroad, he returned to Spain with the Ramón y Cajal repatriation program in 2003 and initiated his own research group working on the genomics and metagenomics of oral bacteria.
In 2009, he was awarded the “Jaime Ferran” National Award for Research in Microbiology and he is currently the principal investigator of the Oral Microbiome Laboratory at the CSISP, in Spain, where he has applied metagenomics and next-generation sequencing technology to the study of dental caries, discovering the presence of bacteria which prevent the formation of cavities, as well as to the study of bacteria from breast milk, saliva, and the respiratory tract.

Danny Grannick

John Haran
Dr. John Haran is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Microbiology & Physiological Systems at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester Massachusetts. He is also Clinical director for the Center for Microbiome Research and member of the Program in Microbiome Dynamics at UMass Chan. He graduated from UMass Medical School in 2007 and completed Residency training at Brown University in 2011. He has been at UMass Chan since then, completing his PhD training in Biomedical Sciences in 2018.
Dr. Haran’s research background has focused on investigations into older adult health and associations with microbiome composition and health outcomes in both nursing home and community-dwelling elders. His earlier work had focused on the microbiome and how dysbiosis can lead to increased risk of bacterial colonization and infection.
Dr. Haran’s current National Institute on Aging and Alzheimer’s Association funding focuses on the oral and gut microbiomes and the roles they play in the “microbiome-brain axis”. He has published findings demonstrating that the intestinal microbiome of elders with Alzheimer’s disease have a pro-inflammatory dysbiotic pattern that can induce disruption of the intestinal epithelium homeostasis in in vitro models. His current work enrolls and follows older adults, collecting longitudinal cognitive data and microbiome data by whole genome sequencing exploring the hypothesis that the microbiome is the driver of immune system dysfunction leading to neurocognitive decline.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic Dr. Haran has been involved in multiple federal and privately funded projects investigating different aspects of this disease. His clinical trial work focused on vaccine, monoclonal antibody, and antiviral trials to prevent or treat COVID-19. He is a leading site in the CDC’s vaccine efficacy surveillance network. His most recent published work describes how an individual’s oral microbiome composition during early infection can predict which patients go on to develop long-COVID.

Bradley Evan
Dr Bradley emergency physician and clinical scientist with a focus on the interaction the microbiome and infectious diseases with the goal is of utilizing cutting edge technologies to address relevant clinical questions that have the highest impact for changing current clinical practice. He is currently engaged in a study of the urinary microbiome to understand microbiome factors that are associated with pathogen colonization and factors that differentiate colonization from active infection.
Recently his work has shifted to focus on COVID19 with funding through the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine. The oral microbiome is hypothesized to influence respiratory health, including how the immune system responds to respiratory viral infection such as influenza and the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of the pandemic Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). In ongoing projects, he is investigating the association between the oral microbiome and acute COVID19 as well as the development of persistent symptoms, known as longCOVID.
EVENT SCHEDULE
Find out the full speaker lineup for the first event ever dedicated to the impact the oral microbiome has on human health and disease.
Please fill in the short form to access the event schedule for 2021.
You will discover our leading academic speakers and oral-related startups that are driving new products to the market such as:
We cannot wait to:
- Understand the root causes of periodontal disease with Professor Jorge Frias-Lopez, Associate Professor, Oral Division at the University of Florida and hear about the links between the Oral Microbiome and cancer from Dr Flavia Teles, Associate Professor at Penn Dental School Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
- Evaluate the role of arginine on the oral microbiome with Dr Maria Ryan, Chief Clinical Officer at Colgate-Palmolive & leading International Academics Drs Alex Mira & Robert Burnes
- Hear the ground-breaking academic research with Marcelo Freire, J.Craig Venter Institute, Purnima Kumar, Ohio State University and many more on the role of the oral microbiome on both oral and human health to assist in the progression of product development
- Meet Nezar Al-hesbshi, Associate Professor at Kornberg School of Dentistry Temple University on his development of an index for modelling dysbiosis in order to understand disease states
- Join an interactive panel of experts, including Danny Grannick, CEO & Founder of Bristle Health, on how best to communicate about & educate the masses on the essential role of the oral microbiome against the backdrop of rising dental health inequality
Will you be joining...
Please fill in this short form to access the event schedule
Our Past Microbiome Attendees

Submit your poster
Are you looking to showcase your recent work to the microbiome community?
Our dedicated poster session is the perfect way to get your research noticed. To present a poster, you need to register as a delegate. Please note that there is limited space available, and poster space is assigned on a first-come, first-served basis (subject to checks and successful registration). At the event, your presentation will be displayed in a dedicated poster area. The poster presentation session time of taking place is to be confirmed.
The poster abstract submission deadline is on 28th September 2021.
Abstracts received after this time may not be accepted, so please submit your abstract as soon as possible!
Posters should be sized A0 (841mm x 1189mm) in portrait orientation.
If you have any questions, please contact [email protected]
#MICROBIOMECONNECTORAL
Past Microbiome Event Testimonials

Conference Packages
Sending Your Team? Group Discounts Available!
Applicable for Primary Market, Service Provider and Industry Rates Only. Not available for Academic or ‘Start-Up’ rates
Book a Team of 3+ - Save an Additional 10% Off
Book a Team of 5+ - Save an Additional 15% Off
If you would like to register a team of 3 or more, please email [email protected] for your discount coupon code before registering. PLEASE NOTE: Discounts cannot be combined with Early Bird Pricing or any other discount or offer. If you have any questions about your registration, please call us on +44 (0)20 3696 2920
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Sponsors
Headline Partner
Colagate
Website: https://www.colgate.com/en-us
Colgate-Palmolive Company is a caring, innovative growth company reimagining a healthier future for all people, their pets and our planet. Focused on Oral Care, Personal Care, Home Care and Pet Nutrition, the Company sells its products in more than 200 countries and territories under brands such as Colgate, Palmolive, elmex, hello, meridol, Sorriso, Tom’s of Maine, EltaMD, Filorga, Irish Spring, PCA Skin, Protex, Sanex, Softsoap, Speed Stick, Ajax, Axion, Fabuloso, Soupline and Suavitel, as well as Hill’s Science Diet and Hill’s Prescription Diet. The Company is recognized for its leadership and innovation in promoting environmental sustainability and community well-being, including its achievements in saving water, reducing waste, promoting recyclability and improving children’s oral health through its Bright Smiles, Bright Futures program, which has reached more than 1.3 billion children since 1991. For more information about Colgate’s global business and how the Company is building a future to smile about, visit www.colgate-palmolive.com. CL-D
Platinum Event Partner
Bacthera
Website: https://www.bacthera.com/
Bacthera is a Danish/Swiss-based one-stop CDMO in the field of LBP’s, with the overall goal to enable the entire industry to further flourish by introducing industry changing innovations.
From small start-up’s to globally operating pharmaceutical companies, we support our clients developing analytical and manufacturing processes of their strains. With our long experience in handling bacteria in DS and DP production, we can offer tailor-made development and large-scale commercial solutions. Within our facilities, we can handle:
- Strictly and facultative anaerobes
- BSL1/2 categorized strains
- GMO’s
Our customers benefit from background technologies and GMP manufacturing know-how that originate from our mother companies Chr. Hansen & Lonza. In addition, Bacthera’s process expertise, enabling innovations and our world-class analytical services will contribute to our customer’s successful development of their LBP.
Diversigen
Website: https://diversigen.com/
Diversigen – Your Expert Source of Reliable Microbiome/Metagenomics Services and Insights
Leverage Diversigen’s CLIA/CAP-accredited microbiome profiling/bioinformatics services across the entire clinical research project lifecycle:
- Quality Leadership - Proven expertise, CLIA/CAP accredited
- Experienced - Pre-clinical studies, large clinical trials to single individual analysis
- Consultative/customized study support
- Breadth of services -16S/metagenomics (WGS)/qPCR development
- Flexible, agnostic bio-informatic pipelines/combined bio-statistical analysis
For more information, visit www.diversigen.com
Gold Event Partner
Biose Industrie
Website: https://www.biose.com/
Biose Industrie is a Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO), specialised in Live Biotherapeutic Products. Founded in 1951, Biose Industrie has more than 65 years of experience in the development and production of live bacteria based drugs. Company offers lab development specialised in microbiology (anaerobic, aerobic, GMO strains) and is Drug GMP certified for the manufacturing of API (From 300L to 3 500L), clinical batches and commercial drug products (capsules in blisters or pills, sachets).
Silver Event Partner
Clinical Microbiomics
Website: www.clinical-microbiomics.com
Our inner ecology – that delicate microbial ecosystem known as the microbiome – is the new frontier in human health. At Clinical Microbiomics, we exist to untangle its complexity in search of mechanisms that impact health and disease.
Identifying and understanding those mechanisms is like looking for a needle in a haystack and demands a truly interdisciplinary approach to microbiome science. Innovating at the forefront of the field, our team of leading scientists creates breakthrough bioinformatics tools and analytical concepts that set new standards for understanding and influencing the microbiome.
Clinical Microbiomics is proud to partner with researchers from the world’s most prominent academic institutions and leading biotech, consumer health and pharma companies. Operating as an extension of their research organizations, we work broader, analyze deeper, and connect the dots to help find the answers needed to impact health and disease.
ReciBioPharm
Website: https://www.recipharm.com/about-us/bolstering-biologics
Please visit our website for more information.Quay Pharma
Website: https://www.quaypharma.com
Quay are world known experts in formulation development and clinical manufacturing of live biotherapeutic dosage forms.
No other CDMO has the breadth of knowledge in the formulation services we offer, our clinical trials manufacturing and supply know how as well as our specialist knowledge in providing cost efficient engineering solutions to meet the many challenges that we know can accompany the finished product manufacture of microbial therapies.
Twenty years of focused know how on formulation and analytical development to meet the demands of global regulatory authorities at all clinical phases, has established Quay Pharma as a leading innovator in the fast growing microbial therapies space. We work with bacteria including fastidious anaerobes, multi-species consortia, viruses including bacteriophages and viral vectors and microbially derived drug products such as recombinant peptides and spores. This diversity requires a broad range of expertise, analytical techniques, operational flexibility and handling requirements to ensure safe and efficacious manufacture specifically during manufacturing scaleup for clinical supply.
We are fully licensed for handling BS class 1 and 2 strains as well genetically modified microorganisms. Quay is able to support your GMP manufacture in Europe and is extending this capability to its new facility in the US.
Unlike other CDMO’s Quay offers a specific formulation route that meets your target profile requirements. We know, from experience, that off the shelf solutions, such as intrinsically enteric capsules do not always work and certainly can not provide the protection to your therapeutics potency that other formulation options do.
Get in touch, we look forward to discussing a bespoke solution to meet your therapeutic needs.
Metabolon
Metabolon deciphers thousands of discrete chemical signals from genetic and non-genetic factors to reveal biological pathways. We make connections where other ‘omics cannot, and provide the definitive representation of the phenotype.
Our work measures inputs from internal and external factors such as health, disease, nutrition, microbiome, medication, pollution, and more, to drive success in answering scientific questions about health and disease.
Every day, we accelerate research that leads to successes in biopharma, population health, consumer products, agriculture, wellness, and academic and government research sectors. This work has enabled modern science to gain a foothold in our understanding of complex disease, ultimately leading to the creation of new treatments that impact individuals and communities globally. Our scalable, customizable metabolomics solutions provide support across the research continuum from discovery through clinical trials, to in-market life cycle management.
Millipore Sigma
Website: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/products/molecular-biology-and-functional-genomics/microbiome
We are Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany the vibrant science and technology company. Science is at the heart of everything we do, it drives the discoveries we make and the technologies we create.
Our products and services help you safely and efficiently develop and manufacture any therapies. We support everything from biologics to cell and gene therapies.
The latest offering is our microbiome platform. We offer microbiome products as well as one stop solution for microbiome multi-omics services: Metagenomics and Metabolomics services.
Our offering of microbiome workflow products and microbiome multi-omic services support researchers and therapy innovators in their pursuit to understand the microbiome. Our metagenomics services include Amplicon Sequencing (16S,18S, ITS) and Shotgun (WGS). Our metabolomics services include detection of Short chain fatty acids (SCFA), Bile acids and Amino acids (AA). Our unique M-CAMPTM cloud-based bioinformatic interactive platform provides users with an easy-to-use web interface to perform bioinformatic analysis on microbiome samples and download publication-ready graphics and reports.
LabSkin
Website: https://www.labskin.co.uk/
Labskin is a world-leading platform that has been producing lab-grown human skin for 15 years and using it to test cosmetic and skin health products for the world’s leading brands. Labskin is the only commercially available full thickness human skin model that naturally mimics the skin's microbiome.
In 2021, we launched Skin Trust Club which combined our deep science knowledge with our AI expertise in solving an unmet consumer need. Skin Trust Clun is a skin health tracking app that provides personalised skin care suggestions based on testing your unique skin microbiome.
CosmosID
Website: www.cosmosid.com
CosmosID® provides end-to-end solutions unlocking the microbiome. A provider of CLIA-certified & ICH-GCP compliant NGS Services and Bioinformatics Solutions, CosmosID offers a range of validated and optimized workflows for research and development.
CosmosID also offers independently validated, industry-leading pipelines for processing metagenomic data, yielding multi-kingdom, strain-level resolution with leading sensitivity and precision. Results can be accessed via CosmosID-HUB, a user-friendly and interactive software for comparative analysis of microbiome data, complete with dynamic charts, visualizations, and statistics.
Bronze Partner
Bristle
Bristle is a direct-to-consumer at-home oral health company. Bristle offers an at-home saliva test that analyzes the oral microbiome to assess a user's oral health status, then provides personalized coaching and recommendations to improve their health.
For more information, visit bristlehealth.com
Event Partner
Microba
Website: https://microba.com/
Microba is a global microbiome company including a precision microbiome analysis service division leveraging superior sampling method, high-throughput sequencing, best-in-class profiler, and the most comprehensive genome reference database.
Combined with advanced analytics, AI expertise and biological knowledge, Microba offers end-to-end research support with robust microbiome analysis and data interpretation, enabling therapeutic, diagnostic discoveries and exploratory microbiome monitoring. Using its platform, Microba’s ongoing population study also provides the largest catalogue of metagenome and associated metadata for data mining, and microbiome associations discovery.
Atlantia Clinical Trials
Website: https://atlantiaclinicaltrials.com/
Please visit our website for more information.B&D Nutritional Ingredients
Website: https://www.bdnutritional.com/
Please visit our website for more information.Media Partners
Partner with Us
Based on your objectives, we can create bespoke packages designed specifically for you – from presenting your expertise on the main stage, to hosting a private dinner. You can partner with us showcase your brand and make valuable new connections. Opportunities predominantly lie in 3 main categories: Thought Leadership, Branding & Networking.
To discuss your objectives and partnership opportunities please contact [email protected]
Interested in a media partnership?
We'd love to hear from you and how we can support one another to connect with the industry. Contact [email protected]
Venue
COURTYARD BY MARRIOTT, BOSTON DOWNTOWN BOUTIQUE HOTEL, 275 TREMONT STREET, BOSTON, MA 02116
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