A traumatic childhood experience in the dentist’s chair is blamed by many adults for their dread of having an oral check-up.

This perception of the dentist’s surgery as a Victorian setting where pain is a by-product of the experience frustrates Professor Nigel Pitts, a dentist who has developed a technique that could make drills, injections and fillings things of the past in the treatment of tooth decay.

Pitts and his colleague Dr Chris Longbottom, from King’s College London, have created a system that will allow teeth with early- to medium-stage damage from dental caries to repair themselves in the time it takes to do a normal filling, without the traditionally invasive techniques.

The new method, called electrically accelerated and enhanced remineralisation (EAER), uses low-frequency electrical currents and is set to come to market in three years after three decades of research in the area by the men behind it. “It is often accepted as norm that you will end up with tooth decay. It is a preventable disease,” said Pitts.

Central to the new method is how tooth decay develops. When plaque combines with sugar or refined carbohydrates, acid is produced which attacks the hard tissues of the teeth, pulling minerals – demineralisation – from the surface and beneath the surface of the tooth. Countering this are the minerals in saliva along with the calcium and fluoride in toothpastes which remineralise the tooth – a process which can happen between 15 and 25 times a day.

If demineralisation outweighs remineralisation, the hard tissues of the tooth break down and eventually produce holes in the teeth cavities. Research has been taking place since the 1980s to find ways to boost remineralisation.

The technology developed by Pitts and Longbottom works in two stages. First the area of the tooth is cleaned, including the inside of the three-dimensional lesion. A tiny electric current then drives minerals into the tooth in a process called iontophoresis.

“Traditionally with caries, we have said ‘you have a sound tooth’ or ‘you have a hole in it’. We haven’t understood this process – the continuum of caries, these multiple stages,” said Pitts.

“Firstly we recognise that that tooth surface is now [after demineralisation] really complicated and what was the sound tooth is full of proteins, lipids, what you had for lunch. All sorts of debris are sitting in that sponge and then people try to throw on a remineralising solution [toothpaste] and it doesn’t work and they are surprised. It won’t work because the surface, a very complicated three-dimensional porous surface, is contaminated and filled up with all sorts of gunk.

“What we have done simply is to devise a method that chemically cleans and pulls out all the various elements that have been acquired over time that are blocking up the inside three-dimensional surface of the lesion, take all that away, produce a surface that is chemically clean and ready to remineralise and then we use iontophoresis.

“We turn the inside of the tooth into an electrode so that the mineral is drawn all the way into the depths of the lesion. So we have conditioned the surface. We have a surface which can remineralise.

“And then we change the electrical fields and drive mineral into the most damaged areas and then rebuild the tooth from inside,” Pitts said.

Still in its early stages, it is envisaged that the process will take some 15 minutes using a “healing hand piece” the size of a highlighter pen. This will have small reservoirs of the materials needed to carry out the painless process in an area like a “very small tea bag”.

It could be carried out by a dentist or a hygienist, depending on the local regulations.

Pitts said the first device would work where the decay had not developed into a large physical cavity but where the dentist would say that it had gone far enough to necessitate a filling – the early to moderate stage. Further research was needed before more extensive lesions could be dealt with, he said.

He said the treatment would fortify the tooth with a stronger form of the original mineral that would be harder to dissolve in future, although long-term research is needed to demonstrate that.

Both cost and time will be comparable to those of a conventional filling, he said, and it was designed to be carried out without the need for a local anaesthetic.

“Rather than wait until you have a hole and pain and discomfort and we have got to take away too much of the tissue, it is early detection, finding lesions in time. And then – what we do at the moment is try to arrest those, stop them progressing – but we will actually be able to stop them and be able to take them back in time.

“That’s why we have been talking about a time warp – we are taking the lesion back in its time course and rebuilding the health of the mineral in it,” he said.

“Instead of having the injection, instead of having the hole cut in your tooth, instead of having a plastic or a metal material put in, you have actually had the tooth dealt with, the demineralisation taken away, natural mineral put back in and the tooth restored to health.”

The cost to the dentist of the equipment and materials has not yet been decided but should be cheaper than comparable technology, according to Pitts.

A company, Reminova, has been set up to commercialise the technology with Pitts as chairman and Longbottom as chief technology officer and is in discussions with investors.

Based in Perth, Scotland, the company is the first to emerge from the King’s College London dental innovation and translation centre, which was set up to take technologies and turn them into new products and practices.