New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair
nottingham.ac.uk
nottingham.ac.uk
All the best,
-HG
In general, not referring to this specific case, scientific papers are often written for people with specialized background and are hard to understand for people without that background, even if they're otherwise smart and educated.
All the best,
-HG
Is this a press release from a university research group, as it appears to be (the site is down)? Then it's nearly meaningless.
They have a video with some more info here: https://pt.fourthievesvinegar.org/w/9aa66b49-2ec5-497f-9f49-...
And apparently the use of NSF does have a bunch of research papers written about it: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amol-Patil-43/publicati...
But an actual medical product for sale to consumers that makes claims like "restores dental enamel" would have to present scientific evidence to the FDA that this claim is accurate.
show us the study
Having an option other than crowning to treat cracks would be a game-changer, especially since the AAE not long ago put out a policy paper recommending that all teeth with cracks (even asymptomatic) receive crown coverage, which is both costly and presents a risk of inducing irreversible pulpitis and subsequent necrosis in the tooth (due to the heat and mechanical trauma of the crown prep.).
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a66012157/hu... regrowth-trials-japan/
This would highly disrupt the dental-industrial-complex
- Cancer
- Tooth regrowth
It feels like it won’t ever be done for some reason
+ Alzheimer’s cure
+ Hair regrowth
...they were persistent vaporware or scams, then suddenly they were real and everywhere. Hopefully that happens for the others too?
They've had those for decades. It's called meth.
One-and-done HIV protection in infants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736988 - July 2025 (First author of the paper even commented here at the time: "labanimalster - First author here. We solved a 30-year problem in gene therapy by leveraging neonatal immune tolerance. A single AAV vector injection encoding HIV antibodies achieved 89% success in newborns vs 33% in 2-year-olds, with protection lasting through adolescence. This could transform HIV prevention in regions where maintaining regular medical care is challenging. Happy to answer questions about the science or implications.")
US FDA approves Gilead's twice-yearly injection [lenacapavir] for HIV prevention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312729 - June 2025
there are more articles about advanced tumors being shrunk to nothing than before (based on my personal monitoring)
Cancer treatment varies by type of cancer but many have dramatically improved outcomes.
Also, everyone has teeth issues, whereas hair issues are mostly limited to a subsection of the population (older males, and not even all of them).
Those men will pay lot of money to get back their hair though.
If I not mistaken it was Bill Gates who said more money is spent in hair regrowth research compared to vaccine to prevent diseases like malaria which kills thousand of people.
(Should have taken better care of it when I was younger and not ignored the massive hole that was growing in it. Chalk it up to a bad dental experience as a child and 25+ years of avoiding dentists as a result...)
Just in case you need someone to, y’know, empathise with you.
I have a lot of people in my life who don’t understand why I don’t just go to the dentist
I'm pleased that I found a good dentist and I've been able to overcome my anxiety. I recognize that I'm lucky in this regard.
I was also lucky in that, aside from this one problem tooth, my oral care regimen in my 26 years of not having regular dental care were sufficient to prevent any further issues. I expected to come out of that first checkup with massive problems (even though I'd never had any pain or issues) and I was pleasantly surprised.
All in all I think I'm very lucky. I tried to take care of my teeth on my own, and largely succeeded, but I do wish I'd taken care of this one problem tooth before it was too late.
Depending on the type of cancer, we now have cures or treatments that stave off death for years.
My wife has a rare type of cancer with not much research thrown at it, and even her type of cancer went from a median time of survival measured in months to several years.
That said, the progress has indeed been miraculous. A great example of the capabilities modern medicine.
Plenty of cancers have become manageable with the advent of immunological treatments.
Tooth regrowth seems to be the most complicated of those three, which isn't even surprising, given that it is basically organ regeneration.
Furthermore, correlation is not causation and it could well be the case that flossing is associated with better outcomes without causing it. For example, people who can afford to go to the dentist regularly are therefore regularly told to floss. People who care about dental health in general probably floss more, but also may be doing other things, consciously or unconsciously, to improve outcomes. Gut (and perhaps mouth) bacteria have behavioral effects; perhaps flossing is caused by having healthy mouth bacteria!
(at least one study says mouthwash is better than floss. That seems obvious to me! liquids are smaller than floss.)
> Starting a flossing regimen after not having one tends to cause pain--isn't that a signal to stop?
Moderate exercise after not exercising for a while causes pain - is that a signal to stop?
In other words, mouthwash offers short-term hygiene benefits but should probably not be used daily unless medically indicated. The oral microbiome matters more than we thought, and indiscriminately nuking it has downstream effects.
re: dental in particular - It seems like enamel regeneration and stem-cell-based tooth replacement have both been in the news year-after-year without applications actually coming to market.
Na, that’s the working class turkey teeth crowd.
Really? This sounds more like someone's plan to get grants to research stem cells than someone's plan to repair (or replace) teeth.
We already have a natural ability to grow new teeth that replace existing ones. Everybody does it... once. Where's the research into getting it to happen again?
> Primary (baby) teeth start to form between the sixth and eighth week of prenatal development, and permanent teeth begin to form in the twentieth week.
So it's probably too late for you.
What's the argument here? You don't think I'm going to live for another 8 years?
Here's an example of one from earlier this year at King's College, London: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/lab-grown-teeth-might-become-an-a...
> Uterine sensitization-associated gene-1 (USAG-1) deficiency leads to enhanced bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling, leading to supernumerary teeth formation.
> there have been real advancements
https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/02/22/272845/regrowing...
As it turns out, this is really hard to do. There are a lot required of teeth: they have to be extremely durable to resist repeated strain of chewing ,stay in the gums, not be rejected by body, etc. It's little surprise progress has been so slow.
There is a lot of hyping of results in medicine papers in general but its not really their fault. The entire academic world is being forced to publish or die as governments look to measure results from the science they instead get what is measured and everyone has to embellish the importance of what they found and always find positive results.
It sounds like they're running it like a business.
This eventually leads to competitors taking over and those business failing, which usually results in people losing their jobs.
When governments get equally incapable, and competitors take over, it tends to be a lot more violent.
It's important to note that "eventually" usually takes so long that it might as well be forever.
If only that fairytale were true. In the real world bloated inefficient companies bribe government, install themselves into government agencies directly (regulatory capture), and hire lobbyists to write laws which protect them from pesky upstarts through unchecked anti-competitive practices and anti-consumer regulation allowing them to stay wealthy and in power forever while killing off innovation and progress.
Comments like this always seem to lead to calls to give the government greater power to rein in those companies.
I'm not claiming these abuses don't exist. But there's no reason not to also look at them as the government getting a lot better at taking advantage of companies, to protect their offices. If you look at it in this context, it should be clear that increasing regulatory authority is far from a solution: it's actually counter-productive, creating tools to facilitate ever-greater abuses.
IBM's stock price is 10 times what it was in 1991. What the hell have they even done in that time?
They don't have to be whatever you think is "industry leading in computing", because apparently just once being worth something was enough to enrich an entire generation of management while the rest of us struggle.
>Ford
Despite decades of failure that led to their struggles in 2008 and an increase in energy costs, they didn't die, and despite then selling several lines of cars that had serious defects that should no longer happen, they abandoned selling anything other than overpriced trucks and are STILL doing just fine.
>Sears
Sears was murdered to enrich a few already wealthy people. At no point did it do worse business.
Do you know which companies you didn't even mention that do not support your claim? All the gigantic conglomerates that own you.
From Disney owning a giant chunk of all media and setting national IP policy, to Sysco being one of the only food service companies because they ate all the other ones so now every restaurant is stuck selling the same food as most prisons, to Nestle owning most of the grocery store so they can sell you water that they pumped out of your aquifer for crazy rates while complaining they couldn't be profitable without slave labor, to Dupont poisoning the entire earth, to fossil fuel companies that set national energy policy, to most farming in the US being beholden to a single legal entity, to the vast majority of "Brands" in the US just being a label change of a product they did not design.
You seem to be under this absurd notion that as long as the brand name on a couple consumer items changes occasionally (due to the kinds of technological innovations that we will never see again and cannot be predicted or relied upon), everything is fine?
You can argue that it's overall bad for the economy, but I think you're missing the arguement.
The escalation in costs have come from: - Incentives around US News College rankings (and the amenities that drive the rankings) - Administrative (non-teaching, non-research) bloat
Research is definitely in need of reform though, but not sure these outcomes are actually causal or even corrilated.
Hey, good point. We should really bring back that 90% top tax bracket rate to get the government back to being financially solvent again.
It's a spending problem. You're anchoring on a talking point with out actually running numbers.
Don't believe me, run the numbers yourself.
From what I can see, taxation as GDP percentage was never really under 10% since 1950, while big cuts to the top tax rate happened in the 60s and 80s (and the federal budget was continuously in the red since mid 70s basically, with one brief exception before 2000).
Just to add some empiricism to the conversation
Fiscal Year Tariffs/Customs Individual Income Corporate Income Top Marginal Rate Receipts (% GDP)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1928 14.0% (approx) DNF DNF 25.0% DNF
1935 8.4% 14.6% 14.7% 63.0% 5.1%
1940 6.1% 13.6% 18.3% 81.1% 6.7%
1944 0.9% 45.0% 33.9% 94.0% 20.5%
1952 1.2% (approx) 42.2% 32.1% 92.0% 19.0%
1960 1.3% (approx) 42.0% 23.0% 91.0% 17.8%
1970 1.1% (approx) 46.0% 18.0% 71.8% 17.9%
1980 0.8% (approx) 47.0% 12.0% 70.0% 18.9%
1990 1.3% (approx) 45.0% 9.0% 28.0% 17.8%
2000 1.1% (approx) 49.0% 11.0% 39.6% 20.0%
2010 1.2% (approx) 41.0% 9.0% 35.0% 14.6%
2015 1.3% (approx) 47.0% 10.0% 39.6% 17.6%
2019 2.0% (approx) 50.0% 7.0% 37.0% 16.3%
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DNF=Did not find
- Tariffs fell from ≈14% of receipts in 1928 to <1% by WWII -> income taxes replaced trade duties.
- Individual income taxes overtook all other sources after 1943
- Corporate shares peaked during war mobilization (~⅓ of revenue in 1944–52).
- Top marginal tax rate was surprisingly not too corrilated to government revenue.
(REALLY wish HN did basic markdown formatting)
Yes. Which is interesting, but also makes sense if you assume that a frequent goal is to shift the tax allocation between wealth classes (adjustments to top rate would be somewhat compensated by other changes).
I think it is always too easy to find arguments for almost any position in data like this, because the overall picture changes dramatically over just a few decades; wealth/income percentiles become qualitatively different as GDP grows ("workers class" pre WW2 is quite different from the same income percentile now) and the data is noisy too, so if you squint you can interpret almost anything in there.
In a perfect world, we would have twenty identical Americas with fixed tax policies, and be able to compare their development over decades; what we have is instead a bunch of different nations radically changing their behavior basically every time a different government comes into power, and many conclusions are inevitably just educated guesswork.
I do think, however, that empiricism is a better framework for grounding outcomes in reality than pure ideology. Pure ideology (either way) is usually just confirms biases by cherry picking data.
The problem is some people prefer an academic lifestyle in exchange for doing performative research.
Yes there are other actors eg politicians demanding performative productivity, but mostly it’s the inmates running the asylum.
Academia is one failed western institution amongst many, and those failures are ultimately directed by the actions of the individuals that comprise those institutions.
It is like saying, if everyone stops subscribing to OnlyFans or liking spicy pics on Instagram, it will go away.
There will always be sycophants willing to do "performative research" or ... other things.
Academia is beyond broken.
The bad drove out the good.
Right, and the prisoner's "dilemma" isn't a real thing; everyone knows it's their own fault for not just all picking the decision that gives them all the best outcome. Every individual within a network effect is obviously responsible for the outcomes the entire system produces.
If you're willing to blame someone for not acting against their own individual interest, doesn't it make more sense for it to be the people who are going out of their way to reward others for acting in that way?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
Evolution creates a situation that encourages all sorts of terrible actions, and the vast majority of people choose to control their animal instincts.
Additionally: the people who encourage the performative research are the people who control grant review. And those people are the same people as the performative researchers.
A bunch of people figured they could make a career doing bs performative research and corrupted the whole system to serve them.
Arguably America is the pinnacle of this right now, where (many) politicians and (many) business leaders now feel justified do whatever's legal just to score points. I would argue this type of thinking was birthed in the UK though under Thatcher who as a first step removed the general trust in (civil servants in her case) your fellow human beings. Blair then came up to replace that trust with KPIs.
We need to get back to a world where we trust people to do the right thing - without measuring their success in short-term KPIs.
The potentially easier way at least to get a lay of the land is to follow pubmed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) for the topic you are interested in, if you then look into those papers you will find funding statements as well as the place the research was conducted and use both to build up a picture of the origins of research in a field.
Afraid I don't know of an easier way not a generic one anyway. Sometimes you just have to follow the right person on twitter who announces trials or studies or be at the right conference. Start with pubmed and the output papers and that will get you started. Then also have a search on the NIH and that might lead you to some links to groups and institutions they fund.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?aggFilters=phase:3,status:...
Says nothing about endemic reproducibility crisis of the social sciences.
Since student loans have been basically guaranteed (bankruptcies can’t erase student loan obligations, in an attempt to push rates lower) and tuition steeply rose, academic institutions’ ratio of administrators to students has skyrocketed to a bureaucratic mess, leading to a flywheel of higher education costs and incentivizing research for money’s sake over impact to the field.
Real impact would be reproducing notoriously iffy studies, but that doesn’t bring in the dollars.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/127083185095
"proven to strengthen tooth enamel" I remember researching the stock and deciding not to buy.
Patents from the 1990s https://patents.justia.com/assignee/enamelon-inc
It seems the company is still around https://www.enamelon.com
_EDIT: “repair and protect”_
I'm going to try Boka as recommended above though, it seems like a more updated and modern solution.
on the neuroscience side, off the top of my head, the most impactful things have been better anticoagulants and preventive care for stroke, monoclonal abs for autoimmune diseases like MS/myasthenia, , certain stereotactic brain surgeries, and such. But considering what ails most people, the overall population effect probably is minuscule compared to say better crash safety in automobiles.
I was about to comment the same thing, I feel like I've been seeing this talked about since the 90s
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03005...
You must be new
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyapatite
Anyone on this stuff? I want to take a break from fluoride paste.
My current routine is roughly brush_teeth(toothpaste={mirasensitive, random_cheap_toothpaste}[day%2]) as you don't need to apply HAP every single day.
I find that I still have to be careful eating apples and lemons straight up. To protect myself I thoroughly swish and rinse water a few times shortly after consuming these fruits. If I don't do that, my teeth get extremely sensitive and it takes a few days for the hap to repair it again.
This is nano-hydroxyapatite, meant to be more effective than hydroxyapatite alone.
(P.S I'm not affiliated with boka)
I decided to try it after all.
In fact, a year ago, they wanted to put in a filling for a minor cavity, but I wanted to put it off and by the time I went back they said it was gone.
edit: I also like the tabs because they're easy to travel with.
Don't see any difference. I'm on a low carb diet and never eat things with added sugar anyways, so I assume that I could even drop toothpaste alltogether.
Also, my teeth have been yellow since as long as I can remember (and long before I got into coffee and tea) and the same is true for everyone in my family - and Boka didn't change that at all.
So... it is not doing me any harm, so far, but it is also not performing any miracles.
A paper from 2011 on the topic:
Site is down, not in archive.org or archive.today. This Yandex Cache link worked for me: https://yandexwebcache.net/yandbtm?fmode=inject&tm=176237557...
For actual mineral replacement, look to fluoride toothpaste/varnish, casein phosphopeptide‑amorphous calcium phosphate (CPP‑ACP), or nano‑hydroxyapatite formulations; xylitol gum is a useful adjunct.
I'm not suggesting there's a conscious conspiracy or anything malicious. But I observe that incentives are weirdly aligned. I wonder what this kind of thing would do to a very large industry if all of a sudden some percentage of business disappeared. Is it a large percentage? Would they pivot to more preventative medicine? Would patients adopt a longer duration between checkups?
I also would imagine cleanings aren't where the big money is in the profession, but like you would be interested to hear from actual dentists.
There will always be accidents and need of non-cavity repairs. As a kid I broke a healthy tooth eating Doritos. It didn't make sense to my dentist either. I've broken a less healthy (but repaired) tooth on a candy coated peanut, and one a Twizzler Nib.
I grind my teeth, so everything is being worn and torn at a higher rate. The mouth guard won't generate itself.
Hate to say it, but if I thought my teeth would stick around longer, I'd probably be more likely to seek cosmetic fixes. I'm apparently really hard on them or something.
Financially, there’d be a short-term hit for offices that rely heavily on fillings, but the field would adjust. Most of us would focus more on prevention, maintenance, and elective care. Dentistry has already been slowly shifting that direction for years with better materials, scanners, and aligners.
So if everyone suddenly stopped getting cavities, I’d still have plenty to do. It would just look a little different.
The societal standard matters more than raw incidence of cavities etc. Three generations ago, it was considered absolutely normal to have dentures in your fifties. Nowadays, middle class people tend to die with (heavily fixed, but still their) teeth and some implants in their mouths.
- Sensodyne Repair and Protect contains 'NovaMin' (possibly only in some markets; check the ingredients!)
- NovaMin is the brand name for calcium sodium phosphosilicate
- It reacts with saliva to form a physical layer of hydroxyapatite on your teeth
- This layer blocks the tubules that trigger pain from temperature and such
- It also supports remineralization (how exactly?)
Unfortunately it isn't actually available where I live (US), and I had to buy it from Canada... from a shop that hasn't had stock for more than a year now. I've tried ordering from other countries, but haven't found anyone else who will ship to the US.
I've tried the "BioMin Restore" toothpaste that is available in the US, and I don't feel like it's doing much of anything, but... again, not sure I'm qualified to evaluate.
https://www.jeancoutu.com/en/shop/categories/personal-care/o...
https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/Sensodyne-Repair-Protect-Sensit...
Btw, what really drives me crazy is that Elmex sells multiple different sorts of tooth paste with the colors green and violett, each. How can a company confuse their customers so much that they buy a tooth whitener paste instead of a remineralizing one? Did the mistake twice...
Please share your experience if you've tried both.
The toothpaste maker wants to claim something like "Novamin is useful". In the EU this is treated as for cosmetics, so relatively low bar to clear. In the US this is treated as pharmaceutical, so a high bar to clear. The manufacturer has decided that passing that bar is not financially sensible for them.
It's actually great stuff and works wonders for tooth sensitivity above and beyond fluoride shellac. I also order it from the more civilized world.
BioMin is available in the US and is similar, but I don't find it works better and I don't like that it doesn't have fluoride. (I live in an area without fluoride in the water)
I have yet to find a replacement for it.
That said, this particular systematic review has a couple of issues (e.g. I can't find the precise inclusion / exclusion criteria, nor can I find that it has been pre-registered on Prospero or another database).
I have written a few systematic reviews where there is very little data already availabe, and we use them to explain to funders why we need to do further research on a given topic.
There is evidence that it can foster enamel/dentin mineral gain, but head to head studies shows that it's comparable to regular fluoride toothpaste and not superior. E.g. In a randomized in-situ trial (Caries Research, 2017), adding 5% NovaMin to a 927-ppm SMFP toothpaste did not improve remineralization outcomes vs the same fluoride formula without NovaMin.
Also, you can find NovaMin in the US (e.g., NUPRO Sensodyne Prophylaxis Paste with NovaMin).
i gave her apagard renamel (with nanohydroxyapatite ). after a few days sensitivity went down and after a few weeks it completely disappeared
He’s a pretty modern dentist I think. He has no idea about it.
Usually the safety profiles of those companies are very very very bad, but probably reference very good research.
For the uninitiated, Theodent is a $100/tube toothpaste made with the chocolate extract theobromine, instead of fluoride, based on a similar paper quite a while back.
there maybe some experimental approach that i dont know of that may save or heal tooth do you know any?
If you ever get into any serious money, forget cars or houses: have your teeth ripped out and replaced with artificial ones.
I wouldn't be surprised if this can, over time, also cause damage to your jaw, and put extra stress on your jaw muscles.
I have four implants, two in my lower jaw, two in my upper jaw. My lower jaw is basically stone, an extremely hard bone even by usual lower jaw standards; the dentists (plural, as one was unable to finish the job) drilling into it destroyed a few drilling bits doing so. I have never had any problems with the lower jaw implants. That bone can take almost anything in stride.
My upper jaw, on the other hand ... very delicate, just enough bone left for the implants to work, and I learnt to be careful about biting into anything harder with them.
And gold is not a good bone-facing material, because bone doesn't fuse with it.
Titanium is favored for implants because it supports osseointegration.
...
Doh, yeah: TSA! Titanium Shock Absorber:
So this entire subthread about implanted teeth rigidly connected to the bone is about mainstream technology, not the state of the art.
These doctors pioneered silicone breast implants.
Eventually side effects happened, and they tried to prevent those patients from coming forward.
Later, it all came out... and all the patients just came back to them and paid for breast upgrades to the next generation saline implants.
TL;DR: EDTA is the magic ingredient that will annihilate the disease-causing biofilm on your teeth & gums, especially when you fund your own studies and spend the rest of your money made from your overpriced toothpaste gel on marketing.
Just brush and floss 2x a day, and chew gum if you like to.
Hmm.
Not to say doing the science and studying to find new approaches is not beneficial. I just think we need to reconsider how we communicate new research. Its like how CEOs hype up AI products at this point. "This will change everything ..... potentially maybe in twenty years (omitted)"