Research & Innovation

CAMP Professor Igor Sokolov Discovers New Technique for Protecting Teeth from Cavities

CAMP Professor Igor Sokolov and graduate student Ravi M. Gaikwad have discovered a new method of protecting teeth from cavities by ultrafine polishing with silica nanoparticles. They adopted polishing technology used in the semiconductor industry (chemical-mechanical planarization) to polish the surface of human teeth down to nanoscale roughness. Roughness left on the tooth after the polishing is just a few nanometers, which is one-billionth of a meter, or about 100,000 times smaller than a grain of sand. It was measured using an Atomic Force Microscope. Sokolov and Gaikwad showed that teeth polished in this way become too "slippery" for the "bad" bacteria that are responsible for the destruction of dental enamel. As a result, the bacteria can be removed easily before they cause damage to the enamel.

Although silica particles have been used before for tooth polishing, polishing with nanosized particles has not been reported. The researchers hypothesized that such polishing may protect a tooth's surface against the damage caused by cariogenic bacteria, because the bacteria can be removed easily from such a polished surface. The results of this work were published in the October 2008 issue of the Journal of Dental Research, the dentistry journal with the top world-wide scientific impact index.

Igor Sokolov is a professor of physics, a professor of chemical and biomolecular science, and director of Clarkson's Nanoengineering and Biotechnology Laboratories Center (NABLAB). Ravi Gaikwad is a graduate student in physics. This is one of the first research projects to be carried out in the recently established NABLAB.

More information about this project can be found at http://jdr.iadrjournals.org/cgi/content/short/87/10/980.