Will Micro-Robots Brush Your Teeth?

Hyun “Michel” Koo grew up in what he calls a “poor section” of Sao Paulo, Brazil, witnessing — and sometimes experiencing — what happens when people can’t get oral health care. Children suffering painful cavities and adults ashamed of missing teeth sparked a lifelong passion to make dental care more available and affordable for people in poor communities and countries. Now, as co-director of a groundbreaking research center at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a dental school professor, he believes he is in position, along with like-minded and enthusiastic colleagues, to start making a dent in this abiding ambition as they develop innovative technologies with the potential to help transform oral health. They are asking things like: What if, for example, inexpensive chewing gum could prevent plaque buildup, tooth decay, and gum disease? Or deliver antivirals against coronavirus? What if swarms of micro-robots could substitute for brushing and flossing? What else could smart technology and engineering do for problems like implant infections, cleft palates, and other dental troubles? Meeting Koo in person for the first time in a large, windowless lecture hall at the Penn dental school in Philadelphia, his excitement was even more clear than in an earlier Zoom interview. The real-life occasion, on June 2, was the start of the inaugural scientific symposium of the Center for Innovation & Precision Dentistry (CiPD), where he had initially served as co-founding director and now serves as co-director along with the equally energetic and optimistic engineering professor Kathleen Stebe. Comprising more than 20 members of UPenn’s Dental Medicine and Engineering and Applied Science faculties, this alliance of the schools, according to Koo, is thought to be the first university research center specifically designed to unite oral health clinicians and scientists with engineers in a formal partnership dedicated to rapidly and radically advancing oral health treatment and knowledge. The center began with a serendipitous research collaboration between Koo, Stebe, and others, which in turn led to a 2018 workshop funded by the university’s vice provost for research. Participants soon formed a task force that evolved into the core group of the new center. Though members had already published journal articles on some of the center’s projects before the symposium, the event was the center’s first chance to present a multi-faceted view of their work to the scientific world. <a href="https://medium.proto.life/will-micro-robots-brush-your-teeth-c8587baa3321">Click Here </a>