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For dentists, a cavity is a conundrum-in order to save the tooth they must further damage it. Currently, the primary way to treat a cavity is to excavate the decay and the surrounding area before filling the resulting crater with a durable surrogate material such as metal, plastic or glass cement.
But what if instead of drilling holes into teeth and patching them up with synthetic fillers,
dentists could coax our pearly whites to regrow themselves? Recently, Paul Sharpe, a bioengineer at King's College London, and his colleagues discovered a new way to do exactly this in mice. Last year they published a
study describing their innovative techniques in
Scientific Reports. And since then they have made even more progress that edges this experimental procedure closer to human clinical trials. If the treatment eventually becomes part of the dentist's standard tool kit, scientists say it would easily be one of the field's most important advances in 50 years.
Our teeth get damaged all the time. Most of the injuries they endure are due to everyday wear and tear as well as the activity of microbes in the mouth. These organisms coat the surface of each tooth and feed on meal remnants. As they break down particles of food, some of these microbes produce and secrete acids as a by-product. And that acidity degrades enamel-the tooth's hard outer layer.
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