A stain-free alternative to silver fluoride
Could a zinc-based solution be the future of caries treatment?
Noninvasive treatment for dental sensitivity and caries is a valuable option for dentists. Silver diamine fluoride is one of these treatment options, but it has the downside of leaving visible, permanent staining on teeth. What if there was another mineral that could deliver the same benefits without the aesthetic downside?
Marc A. Walters, PhD, a professor of chemistry at NYU, is exploring zinc’s potential power to treat dental caries and hypersensitivity. He spoke with Dental Bite about his research and how it could become a treatment option available to patients in the future.
—Interview by Carrie Pallardy, edited by Bianca Prieto
Can you tell me how you were first approached by NYU College of Dentistry researchers? Why were they interested in your work?
One of my colleagues brought someone to my office from the College of Dentistry who was interested in silver nanoparticles. I had been working with silver nanoparticles that we were using to study MRI contrast agents. At that point, I was introduced to the topic of treating caries with a silver-based material.
Silver diamine fluoride (SDF) is an excellent agent for the treatment of caries. I think that it's a rather brilliant application to dentistry and to relatively non-invasive dentistry. But the residual pigmentation was of some concern to me. I thought that maybe we might be able to come up with a solution to the pigmentation.
You are developing zinc-based materials for the treatment of cavities. What advantages could this have over current treatments available in dentistry?
Zinc gives compounds that have no color. Zinc does not absorb visible radiation. Our initial foray into this involved using zinc to dilute silver diamine fluoride. We found that the pigmentation that resulted was still quite noticeable. I thought perhaps we could resort to using zinc compounds exclusively without silver. Silver is photoactive. We think that's the major problem.
Where we are at present is that we've developed a zinc-based compound that, when added to neutral solutions, deposits minerals. The minerals that we know of at this point are zinc oxide; that's the primary one.
What we've been able to show is that our solutions deposit zinc oxide deep in dentin tubules. The idea there is that these deposits can prove robust over a period of many months. They can possibly attenuate dental hypersensitivity.
Zinc oxide is known for its antimicrobial characteristics. We're not sure exactly how this might be implemented in the future, but our solutions are rather easy to use. They're applied just as SDF would be applied. We think that, at the very least, this should be explored as an efficacious way of treating dental caries.
What comes next in your research? What kind of timeline do you anticipate for moving to clinical trials?
At this point, we're working with a company that has SDF as one of its products. We're interested in clinical trials primarily, first and foremost, but I'm a chemist, so I leave it to my collaborators to determine the next steps. The hope is that in the not-too-distant future, our zinc agent could be available for use.
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Dental Bite is curated and written by Carrie Pallardy and edited by Lesley McKenzie.
