Diamonds are said to be a girl’s best friend, and it turns out that they could be a pretty strong ally in everyone’s dental health – although don’t go racing to Tiffany’s just yet, as these diamonds are so small, they are invisible to the naked eye. In yet another case of ‘tiny but mighty’ it is the time for nanodiamond to take to the (microscope) stage. Often overshadowed in the nanotechnology world by its siblings, carbon nanotubes and graphene, dusty fragments of diamond have now found a use in the world of dentistry.
A root canal dental procedure is relatively commonplace these days, carried out to remove what is delightfully termed the infected ‘dental pulp’ - the blood vessels and nerve tissue of a tooth that has become infected. The vacant cavity created by the removal of this matter is then filled with a material known as gutta-percha, a biocompatible polyisoprene polymer made from the sap of the Palaquium gutta tree. In theory, the removal of infected dental pulp ought to remove all trace of infection however, this is not always the case, and often a patient will be left with a residual infection that develops over time, resulting in further inflammation in small gaps that the filler cannot fill and possibly loss of the tooth. As this cavity has been filled with gutta-percha, the infection takes hold deep inside the tooth, with no hope of treating it.
Gutta-percha is certainly biocompatible, and its low reactivity in the body is one of the material properties that contributes to its choice as a dental filler, but in terms of its rigidity it falls down, and it is not the ideal material to keep infections at bay. This is where composite materials save the day. A composite material is one that contains a range of materials that each contribute one or more beneficial materials properties to the resultant bulk material. In this case, scientists at UCLA Dentistry in the United States incorporated tiny nanodimensional fragments of diamond that were produced as a waste product of diamond mining and refining into this gutta-percha, resulting in a more mechanically robust dental filling material. This certainly overcame the challenge of using a filler material that was not very strong, but what about tackling the issue of reinfection from trace infected dental pulp, and the fact that the filler did not efficiently fill the entire cavity?
The UCLA Dentistry researchers decided to combine forces with materials scientists and microbiologists to devise a way to preload the nanodiamond with a common antibiotic, amoxicillin, which should combat any infection that developed following the root canal procedure. Through close monitoring, it was found that although the filler did not reach every space within the tooth, the rate of infection following the treatment was much lower when the preloaded nanodiamond was incorporated within the gutta-percha.
Over the next two years, the UCLA Dentistry team plan on carrying out further with their colleagues in other Departments, and hope to optimise this material in order to carry out clinical trials that could well lead to widespread use of this filler materials, resulting in smiles that really will sparkle!
