Improving dental safety
Introduction
UIC Distinguished Professor Alexander Yarin and a team of researchers at UIC invented a new gel for a dental tool that could revolutionize the dental industry and make it safer.
Dentists frequently use ultrasonic scaling tools known as Cavitrons, which use vibrations and water to clean teeth. The tool produces a sound wave that creates vibrations in its tip and also releases water adjacent to the tooth to create cavitating bubbles, which loosen plaque and tartar from teeth. While the device can remove up to 50% more biofilm than hand scaling and is much faster, it also aerosolizes water and saliva droplets into the air. These droplets could bacteria and viruses and transmit diseases to other patients and health providers.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, UIC’s College of Dentistry turned to the College of Engineering to help improve the ventilation and catch some droplets created by the Cavitrons and dental drills.
“I immediately propose another idea to change a little bit of the irrigation fluid from water to any dilute FDA-approved polymer solution, which will eliminate droplets completely,” he said. “Such a solution could be pumped through the dental chair as easily as water to have a low shear viscosity but should develop dramatically high elongational viscosity of viscoelastic origin in stretching, which prevents detachment of droplet tails from the main body of the irrigation fluid.”
After three years of developing the product at the company in collaboration with Yarin, the final product has been released in the U.S. and Europe and is available to dental professionals as VivaDent Aerosol Reduction Gel. The estimated market value could reach $1 billion annually.