Creighton researchers develop promising dental technologies
by Nicole Resnick
A part of the human body that is often taken for granted, the mouth faces some unique challenges.
“The oral environment is a really hard one to engineer for,” says Dr. Mark Latta, associate dean for research and professor of general dentistry at Creighton University. “People put a lot of different things in their mouths, not to mention the changes in temperature and range of solvents that the mouth is exposed to. Humans can generate a tremendous amount of force from chewing as well.”
“But above all, when you’re talking about dental materials you need biocompatibility,” continues Latta. “While many promising products are toxic, as humans we require agents with specific and safe properties. This is not a trivial problem, and it makes for a tough engineering puzzle.”
Latta, along with collaborator Stephen Gross, assistant professor of organic chemistry at Creighton University, are working to solve the puzzle by developing new technology platforms designed to improve dental health.
The two colleagues first approached the challenge from different angles – Latta as a leader and researcher in clinical dentistry and Gross as an organic chemist and polymer scientist – but the partnership clicked from the get-go.
They recently formed a limited liability company with the help of Creighton Intellectual Resources Management (IRM) so they could pursue their promising work. With the backing of Creighton they are exploring the field of biomaterials research and applying their findings to dentistry.
“One of our platforms specifically involves dental composites, and specifically of dental materials of greater strength and durability,” says Latta. “A much broader platform we’re pursuing is the delivery of biologically active agents to help prevent dental disease and treat existing dental disease.”
Poor dental health is surprisingly prevalent today. Dental decay is still considered a pandemic disease, especially in children, according to Latta and Gross, and so they are focused on solving problems that will have a direct impact on the cost of dental care.
In certain populations where access to dental care is difficult and there is a significant shortage of resources, the ability to prevent decay and minimize the number of restorative dentistry procedures through improved dental materials would translate into a huge cost savings.
“For example, if the mean service life of a filling is five years and we can extend that to 15 years, it would have a major impact on dental costs,” explains Latta.
The failure of dental fillings is pervasive in the dentistry field and typically occurs for one of two reasons – new decay or recurrent decay in the filled tooth, or fracture of the filling. Latta’s and Gross’s goal of creating stronger dental composites directly addresses the problem of fractured fillings.
Yet their other research platform – effective systems designed to send biologically active agents to the actual site of dental decay – has the potential to eradicate both problems.
What is novel and exciting about this technology is not the bioactive agents themselves, but rather their method for delivering them to the site of decay. The key is to put such agents into the actual fillings themselves.
“The bioactive agents that we research are currently available, but in preparations that are topically applied. When delivered this way they don’t hang around very long,” says Latta. “By putting these agents into the fillings themselves they are released locally at the interface of the tooth and the filling, and so they are doing the work right where they need to do it.”
To protect their intellectual property and ensure that their promising technologies will eventually be translated to the field of clinical dentistry, Latta and Gross turned to Creighton Intellectual Resources Management for help in filing three separate patents.
IRM also played a pivotal role helping them apply for specific research funding at various phases of their collaboration, as well as facilitating key business contacts such as the Nebraska Business Development Center.
Other significant contributors to the promising work led by Latta and Gross are the dental and chemistry students in their respective research laboratories.
“Our collaboration provides a terrific opportunity to bring our students in, and it has worked largely because we involve our students to a great degree,” says Latta.
“We agree that this is a critical strength of Creighton, and undergraduate research opportunities are something we’re particularly proud of here,” says Gross. “As educators, this is very important to us.”
These exciting research breakthroughs may one day change the face of combating dental decay, providing the field with safer, stronger cost-effective dental composites that will improve people’s lives.