NDCS Research and Innovation

NDCS: Leading National Oral Health Advancement

Oral diseases are among the most common chronic conditions worldwide, yet remain poorly integrated into broader healthcare, population health, and chronic-disease prevention frameworks. This gap is increasingly important for Singapore given population ageing, multimorbidity, and rising demand for complex care, which call for more preventive, precise and value-based oral healthcare models.

Academic Health Sciences Systems (AHSS) roles have expanded beyond clinical care to include research translation, population health, community engagement, and equitable outcomes. As Singapore’s largest AHSS that links research, education and national-scale care delivery, SingHealth is well placed to enact this vision. The National Dental Centre Singapore (NDCS) has been the country’s national specialist centre for nearly 30 years, combining specialist care, oral and craniofacial research, workforce training, and translational platforms. Situated within the SingHealth Duke‑NUS AMC and supported by the Oral Health Academic Clinical Programme (ORH ACP), NDCS bridges clinical delivery with academic and research strengths to advance national oral healthcare. 

NDCS Oral Health Research Strategy

The central challenge is to understand how oral health contributes to multimorbidity, functional decline and healthy ageing, and how this disease burden can be reduced across the care continuum. Addressing this challenge requires earlier population level detection, precision risk stratification, scalable preventive models, regenerative and digital solutions, and value-based evaluation to guide adoption into routine care. Hence, the unifying scientific question is, how does oral health influence multimorbidity, functional decline, and healthy ageing in Singapore's population, and how can precision oral health tools, regenerative technologies, and data-driven care models reduce disease burden across the continuum by 2030?

The five themes answer that question in sequence:                    

Theme 1: Population Oral Health provides the life-course evidence base using the NDCS Oral Disease Registry hosted by the SingHealth Duke-NUS Research Data Lake.

Theme 2: Precision Oral Health advances multiomics, microbiome and biomarker discovery, and AI-enabled risk prediction to support earlier detection, and precision prevention.

Theme 3: Orofacial Regeneration develops regenerative biomaterial and tissue-repair approaches, focusing on bio-instructive scaffolds, implant coating, and preclinical models.

Theme 4: Orofacial Devices, Therapeutics and Digital Solutions translate digital dentistry, devices, and AI-enabled tools into deployable solutions, supported by cluster incubation and prioritization pathways when projects are ready for licensing and commercial scale-up.

Theme 5: Appropriate and Value-Based Care serves as a cross-cutting evaluation layer spanning Themes 1 to 4. It assesses outcomes, cost, quality, access, equity, patient experience and implementation feasibility, ensuring that innovations are adopted and sustained in routine care.