The implant alternative every dentist should know about
Traditional dental implants help many patients, but not all. When a patient lacks the necessary alveolar bone, dentists must explore other options.
Robert G. Hale, DDS, a board-certified oral and maxillofacial surgeon, was involved in the early clinical research stages for a device designed to help those patients. He spoke with Dental Bite about the FDA-approved device and how he hopes to see it integrated into more dental practices.
—Interview by Carrie Pallardy, edited by Bianca Prieto
How does the KLS Martin Preprosthetic device help patients who cannot have traditional dental implants?
Traditional dental implants require adequate alveolar bone. When you're losing lots of teeth because of periodontal disease, you may have insufficient bone for conventional dental implants. Then, you'll require extensive bone grafting procedures, which are not predictable, especially in older patients.
The KLS Martin Preprosthetic supports the dental post, which then supports the dental prostheses at a higher level in the cranial-facial skeleton. That's where this device attaches. So, it's held in by remote fixation, much like an orthopedic device.
You participated in early clinical research for this new device. What was that process like?
Early in my career, I think all professionals saw that there was a limitation of care and that the only avenue to help our patients was to do bone grafting, which is not as predictable as one might think. I was doing work on soldiers who were badly injured, and they had a lot of titanium bone plates that we were using to reconstruct their faces. An innovation came along where we were able to design custom titanium bone plates using CT images and provide the soldiers with custom titanium 3D printed plates. It was an easy jump from there to say we can design something to support dental posts, if we can get a company interested in that type of development, which KLS Martin was.
I started working on this concept in my mind many years ago, but I started putting images down on paper in late 2017, which was about the same time KLS Martin was starting to develop similar ideas with researchers in Europe. It all kind of came together over a period of three or four years from there. It was a combination of many people's efforts that then allowed the company to spend the money to develop it and get it FDA approved.
Now, it's really part of every oral surgeon’s toolbox in medical centers for treating people who've had cancer surgeries, injuries or bad infections. We want to inform dentists of this device so that they can start thinking about it for their private patients who don't have cancer or horrible injuries, but would likewise benefit from this technology.
How can dentists integrate this device into clinical practice?
I would say that oral surgeons and prosthodontists would be the ones who would take this up first because we have the patients who currently cannot be treated. We don't have anything to offer them that is predictable. And then we'll see how the rest of dentistry picks up on it.
This takes 90 minutes, and I've done eight cases in my office. There have been well over 500 cases done in hospitals around the country, and this will continue to grow and develop.
It's less invasive. There are fewer steps, and it takes less time than the current approach. The only thing that it doesn't improve on is it's not less expensive.
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Dental Bite is curated and written by Carrie Pallardy and edited by Lesley McKenzie.
