A research platform built by a clinician, for clinicians.
OVN Nexus exists because the mouth-body connection deserves to be studied with the same rigor we apply to any other part of medicine — and because the people best positioned to move that science forward are the dentists, surgeons, physicians, and researchers who see patients every week.
Founder
S. Thaddeus Connelly, DDS, MD, PhD, FACS
Oral & maxillofacial surgeon · Clinician-scientist · San Francisco, California
Thad is a practicing oral & maxillofacial surgeon who has spent his career at the intersection of clinical care and basic science. He trained as a dentist and a physician, completed surgical residency, and earned a PhD focused on the biology of the mouth and its connections to the rest of the body. He continues to see patients and operate, and most of what shows up on this platform started as a question he couldn’t answer in clinic.
His clinical and academic affiliations include UCSF, the San Francisco VA Medical Center, and Sutter Health. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He is also the founder of Gengyve USA, a small, disabled-veteran-owned oral-health company building products in the same scientific spirit as this platform, and co-founder of Boutique Venture Partners, a venture firm supporting early-stage healthcare and technology founders.
He writes The Oral Health Bulletin, a weekly clinical newsletter on the oral-vascular-neural axis, read by roughly 2,800 clinicians and researchers. The point of the writing — and of OVN Nexus — isn’t to overclaim. It’s to give the field a careful, evidence-tiered way to talk about what we know, what we suspect, and what we are still testing.
Why OVN Nexus exists
Most dental and medical training treats the mouth and the rest of the body as separate problems. The literature increasingly suggests they aren’t. Oral microbes release inflammatory signals that reach the heart, brain, and immune system. The question isn’t whether the connection exists — it’s how much of it is causal, how much is modifiable, and what clinicians should actually do about it on a Tuesday afternoon.
OVN Nexus is the place where that conversation happens. The Science section uses an explicit evidence-tier framework — Established, Supported but Not Settled, and Hypothesis Under Test — so readers always know what footing a claim is on. The Education modules turn the literature into something usable in clinic. The Bulletin tracks the field week by week. And the research portal (for credentialed members) lets clinicians actually contribute data and case observations back to the community.
It is built and maintained by working clinicians. It is intentionally honest about what is and isn’t known. And it is free to read — the science doesn’t move forward if it sits behind a paywall.
If this work has been useful, take a look at Gengyve.
OVN Nexus is free and will stay free. The work behind it — the writing, the research, the platform — is supported in part by Gengyve USA, the oral-health company Thad founded with the same science in mind. The flagship product is a fluoride-free, chlorhexidine-free daily mouthwash built around hyaluronic acid and a short list of natural ingredients, developed for the kind of long-term, low-irritation use that a prescription rinse can’t support.
If you’ve gotten value from anything on this site — the Bulletin, the education modules, the framework — the most direct way to keep it going is to try a bottle. It’s a small, veteran-owned company. Every order genuinely matters.
Gengyve USA is a separate company from OVN Nexus. Nothing on this platform is a product endorsement of any specific therapy for any specific systemic condition.