A research team led by scientists at Queen Mary University of London, UK, has developed a new way to grow materials which could regenerate hard tissues. The materials exhibit high stiffness, hardness, and acid resistance, and could be used for a wide variety of dental complications such as the prevention and treatment of tooth decay or tooth sensitivity — also known as dentin hypersensitivity.

Enamel, located on the outer part of our teeth, is the hardest tissue in the body and enables our teeth to function for a large part of our lifetime despite biting forces, exposure to acidic foods and drinks and extreme temperatures. This remarkable performance results from its highly organized structure.

However, unlike other tissues of the body, enamel cannot regenerate once it is lost, which can lead to pain and tooth loss.

These problems affect more than 50% of the world’s population and so finding ways to recreate enamel has long been a major need in dentistry.

The new study shows that the new approach can create materials with remarkable precision and order that look and behave like dental enamel.

“A major goal in materials science is to learn from nature to develop useful materials based on the precise control of molecular building-blocks,” said study senior author Professor Alvaro Mata, from Queen Mary’s School of Engineering and Materials Science.

“The key discovery has been the possibility to exploit disordered proteins to control and guide the process of mineralization at multiple scales. Through this, we have developed a technique to easily grow synthetic materials that emulate such hierarchically organized architecture over large areas and with the capacity to tune their properties.”

“Enabling control of the mineralization process opens the possibility to create materials with properties that mimic different hard tissues beyond enamel such as bone and dentin.”

“This is exciting because the simplicity and versatility of the mineralization platform opens up opportunities to treat and regenerate dental tissues,” added study first author Dr. Sherif Elsharkawy, from Queen Mary’s School of Engineering and Materials Science.

“For example, we could develop acid resistant bandages that can infiltrate, mineralize, and shield exposed dentinal tubules of human teeth for the treatment of dentin hypersensitivity.”

“The mechanism is based on a specific protein material that is able to trigger and guide the growth of apatite nanocrystals at multiple scales — similarly to how these crystals grow when dental enamel develops in our body. This structural organization is critical for the outstanding physical properties exhibited by natural dental enamel.”

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Sherif Elsharkawy et al. 2018. Protein disorder-order interplay to guide the growth of hierarchical mineralized structures. Nature Communications 9, article number: 2145; doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-04319-0