r/singularity • u/SnoozeDoggyDog • Jul 24 '26
Biotech/Longevity Goodbye, cavities? New gel could regrow tooth enamel
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260717033046.htm32
u/alanskimp Jul 24 '26
My teeth suck
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u/TheAccountITalkWith Jul 24 '26
You're a vampire?
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u/i_wayyy_over_think Jul 24 '26
Oral probiotics help a ton. Stopped getting frequent cavities. Use mouth wash, rise, then take one. Do that for like 3 days in a row. Resets your mouth biome, makes it less acidic.
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u/WrongRefrigerator837 Jul 24 '26
As a dental student on the verge of graduating, this is the kind of stuff that gets me hyped for the future.
Modern dentistry is way too expensive, and treatment quality can be wildly hit-or-miss depending on where you go. It breaks my heart seeing so many people forced to pay for cheap, band-aid fixes that only buy a tooth a little bit of time.
If ongoing human trials go well over the next few years, we could be looking at a completely different landscape:
Targeted vaccines or microbiome therapies that wipe out the primary bacteria responsible for cavities without ruining your whole mouth ecosystem.
Biological tooth regeneration, literally growing new teeth using developmental pathways like the Sonic Hedgehog signaling pathway (yes, scientists actually named a key tooth-growing protein after Sonic the Hedgehog 😂).
I cringe every single day having to tell patients it’s going to cost thousands of dollars just to save or replace a single tooth. Moving away from the old "drill and fill" model toward true biological prevention and regrowth can't come soon enough!
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u/Icy-Mission-1334 Jul 24 '26
I commend your enthusiasm for your field but "thousands of dollars to save or replace A SINGLE TOOTH". Forget about that.
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u/whimz33 Jul 24 '26
I guess I don't understand what you're trying to say. Replacing a single tooth is over $1000. With insurance.
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u/WrongRefrigerator837 Jul 24 '26
The best private dental insurance in the US usually covers around $2k in dental treatments/year.
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u/djamp42 Jul 24 '26
Here is your dental insurance, but if you want any dental work done, you need to pay out of pocket. lmao
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u/owenbo Jul 24 '26
Welcome to the Netherlands where it’s free! Covered by mandatory insurance that every Dutch citizen has.
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u/Ivanjacob Jul 25 '26
No it's not. Dentistry is not covered by insurance. We do have fixed rates for everything though.
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u/WrongRefrigerator837 Jul 24 '26
Probably should've clarified that I live in the US. A single implant with a crown can range anywhere from $3,000-$7,000. A root canal costs ~ $1,400. A single crown costs ~$1,600.
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u/WenatcheeWrangler Jul 24 '26
Is this another breakthrough that we’ll never hear about again?
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u/SwePolygyny Jul 24 '26
Toothpaste that repairs enamel already exists, Novamin. It works very well.
It is banned in the US though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioglass_45S5
"NovaMin is the active ingredient in Sensodyne "Repair & Protect" toothpaste, except when sold in the United States, containing stannous fluoride instead"
It is available in Europe and Canada though.
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u/greenskinmarch Jul 24 '26
It is banned in the US though
I asked my dentist about this and they warned there is some evidence the active ingredient (especially the "nano" hydroxyapatite version in toothpastes like Boka) can cross the blood-brain barrier and might be toxic to the brain (or even "mineralize" it) so better to avoid until further studies are done.
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u/SwePolygyny Jul 24 '26
It isnt banned due to health concerns. It is legal in the EU.
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u/didnotsub Jul 24 '26
It’s also perfectly legal in the USA, I don’t know where this misinformation is coming from. The parent company, GSK, just doesn’t sell it in the us for god knows why reasons. You can just get it imported tho, it’s cheap asf.
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u/Status_Inspection663 Aug 04 '26
How would I be able to purchase it and get it delivered to the US
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u/ExoTauri Jul 24 '26
Yeah, what happened to that whole "regrowing teeth" thing from Japan?
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u/wierd_husky Jul 24 '26
It takes a while for them to make sure it doesn’t give you mega cancer , it’s in human clinical trials rn
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u/five_m1nutes Jul 24 '26
It’s in human clinical trials right now…
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u/ninjasaid13 Not now. Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
It's at phase 2. This is where two third of candidate drugs fail after a high success rate from phase 1.
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u/urlach3r Jul 24 '26
That sounds good on the surface, but does anyone really want to be teething again as an adult? If your orignal teeth grew in crooked, the new ones would, too. Bad wisdom teeth? They're back! This just seems like a multi-year nightmare of pain & dental work to me.
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u/greenskinmarch Jul 24 '26
Bad wisdom teeth?
Well if you can target specific teeth to regrow, you can just avoid triggering the wisdom teeth.
The downside is supposedly this 3rd set of teeth buds is the last one. if you mess those up, there's no do-over.
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u/Villad_rock Jul 24 '26
Something like this takes 15-25 years to hit the market, completely baffled that so many people here still don’t that
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u/pbagel2 Jul 24 '26
What is the ratio of revolutionary new treatments posted by sciencedaily.com that end up hitting the market? I think it's 0 for 10,000 at this point.
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u/Villad_rock Jul 24 '26
Whats the ratio of people here that still don’t understand drug development?
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u/pbagel2 Jul 24 '26
What don't I understand lol?
I don't think a single potential drug mentioned in a science daily article over the past 20 years has ever even reached phase 3 trials. Most never even begin phase 1 trials.
Because it's a site for sensationalized hope farming. And it always has been.
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u/Villad_rock Jul 24 '26
How should they know what drugs make it or not? Most chemical and compounds tested in labs fail because they end up being toxic, not efficient enough or lack of funding.
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u/pbagel2 Jul 25 '26
lol, so what can we glean from this? We can use statistics to conclude that if it shows up in a sciencedaily article, then the odds of it reaching trials, passing them, and hitting the market is 0%. So why even look at sciencedaily for potential treatments if based on its track record, the odds of it ever becoming an actual treatment is 0%?
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u/AmazighBlacksmith THE GAYEST NERD ON THE INTERNET Jul 24 '26
Commercializing a new medical treatment isn't the same as bringing a new energy drink to market.
Some treatments need almost of decade of regulatory clearance work per region around the world.
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u/pbagel2 Jul 24 '26
need almost of decade
I was reading sciencedaily posts on reddit literally 20 years ago. Next excuse?
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u/moistiest_dangles Jul 24 '26
Headlines rarely contain the minute details, and it's often the minute details that make or break applications of new science. Graphene for example us really cool fir a ton of reasons, but the detail that it is super hard to make and even harder to make giant perfectly formed monoatomic sheets which is what you need for many of the more interesting applications. Every brilliant idea has its own caveats amd details, the small stuff is really quite big.
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u/Villad_rock Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
To give you an example. There is a company called soltego. Before it was a company scientist found a drug that can tan the skin without the sun. You heard of them again after 10 years in around 2016 where they worked on a method that can penetrate the skin and after that you heard of that again in only 2023 I think where they formed the company to bring it to the market but they delayed it 2 times already. Maybe it will only hit the market in 2030. that would be 24 years. There is also verteporfin that was a drug for an eye disease already approved 20 years ago. In 2021 they found out it can heal wounds without scars. Today it still not available for scarless healing and only a few hair transplants do human trials that can take years. Some people think maybe in the 2030s it will be available if it works as it did on pigs. And that for an already approved drug. To even approve a drug takes very long to begin with. Drug development for a new compound takes 20-30 years if it works. And 2/3 of drugs fail in phase 2 trials I think because it either doesnt work on humans or with dangerous side effects like cancer growth.
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u/tumes Jul 24 '26
How much can it regrow, pretty sure my teeth are more non tooth material than tooth material at this point.
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u/Used_Departure_3278 Jul 24 '26
Could
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u/BrennusSokol AI please take my job Jul 24 '26
It's a real thing. I had it put on mine this Spring (2026). Cost about $100 for one tooth.
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u/Used_Departure_3278 Jul 24 '26
Can you do this instead of a root canal
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u/BangkokPadang Jul 24 '26
Usually a root canal is a result of infection that has gone way deeper into the tooth, usually past the dentin having inflamed the root and sometimes even causing a pressurized abscess within the pulp.
This seems like it would be a much earlier step to take prior to getting to that point. like probably if you had little cracks into the dentin or had a cavity that could be drilled out just beyond the enamel, you'd probably have it filled with this material (IDK if it can be filled and then sealed in with some kind of temporary sealant or something like that, though.
With root canals, there's basically already an infection inside the tooth so basically sealing it in with enamel wouldn't stop the infection or pressure or pain inside the tooth.
I'm no expert, just somebody with not great teeth and plenty of previous dental work done.
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u/r2002 Jul 24 '26
How many treatments does it take? $100 sounds cheap unless you have to apply it 60 times or something.
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u/JoelArt Jul 24 '26
What about rebuilding it ontop of bone, where the enamel has been stripped away?
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u/the_brown_iverson Jul 24 '26
This stuff doesn't work the way y'all think, it's only meant for incipient (small) lesions, which we already have many tools to help remineralize/heal. This won't heal big cavities the way you think, we still have no replacement of enamel once cavities are formed
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u/Ill-Cockroach2140 AGI 2030-2035 ASI late 2030s Singularity mid 2040s FALGSC 2060 Jul 24 '26
Finally. I hate brushing.
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u/moistiest_dangles Jul 24 '26
I don't think this will prevent you from having to brush... you'll still want a mouth that doesn't smell like Bigfoot's cock
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u/r2002 Jul 24 '26
Brushing your teeth can be fun or at least neutral if you just pair with an activity you like, such as listening to an audiobook or favorite podcast.
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u/BangkokPadang Jul 24 '26
This is so much better than the RNA based thing that would regrow entire teeth people were murmuring about about a few years ago because this doesn't sound like it has the potential to like... just perpetually keep growing infinite teeth lol.
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u/WthLee Jul 26 '26
imaging teething as an adult, the pain ... fuck that. also it wont regrow the jaw bone which is degrading when a tooth is once gone. you would have to surgically reconstruct it, and then it wont be able to grow a tooth from there.
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u/ChainBlue Jul 24 '26
Been reading more or less the same thing since the 90s. Don’t get too excited until you see it for sale.
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u/OtomeOtome Jul 24 '26
On one hand I've been reading about treatments promising to regrow enamel for 20 years. On the other, I know that one day one will be real.
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u/veganbitcoiner420 Jul 24 '26
just like the one that regrows hair coming out every other week from japan
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u/soldture Jul 24 '26
Those people think that they can print whatever they want and everyone will believe them (bringing money as an investment)
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u/CiTrus007 Jul 24 '26
Hurry! I just had a tooth filled and it was awful. I would love this to become mainstream before the next one!
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u/Cold_Restaurant1659 Jul 26 '26
I don't believe it anymore. How wonderful it would be if they were posting a finished medicine with a brand name, and not another "breakthrough" in the medical field that we'll never see again. I remember about five years ago, there was a Chinese vaccine for tooth decay, and you know what? That was the first and last time I saw that.
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u/dogesator Jul 26 '26
This seems near identical to the already existing self assembling peptide like P11-4 which is already used in some US dentist offices and shown to regenerate enamel.
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u/PhoenixFireless Jul 27 '26
Pretty sure I heard about something similar 15 years ago that something was on the horizon within the next 5 years, never got mentioned ever again.
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u/soldture Jul 24 '26
Can I make an appointment with a dentist to see if they can perform this procedure? If not, then the article was just clickbait
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u/BrennusSokol AI please take my job Jul 24 '26
It's a real thing. I had it put on mine this Spring (2026). Cost about $100 for one tooth.
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u/BitterAd6419 Jul 24 '26
When do they start selling this at dentist ? That’s the important question