How to eliminate pain tied to tooth decay
Dual discoveries at USC propose a promising method to regrow nonliving hard tissue, lessening or even eliminating pain associated with tooth decay, which the National Institutes of Health calls the most prevalent chronic disease.
Janet Moradian-Oldak, a professor at the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC, has investigated methods to regrow tooth enamel for the past two decades. The process is especially tricky because unlike bone, mature enamel cannot rejuvenate. Tooth enamel is a nonliving tissue.
The a-ha moment came Oct. 22 when, in collaboration with lead author Sauma Prajapati of USC and other colleagues, she published a study in the Biomaterials journal saying matrix metalloproteinase-20, an enzyme found only in teeth, chops up amelogenin proteins, which facilitate organized enamel crystal formation. MMP-20 clears the way for hard material to usurp vacated space. Her team is the first to define the function of an enzyme for preventing protein occlusion inside a crystal, she said.
MMP-20 is released at a very early stage of enamel formation, said Moradian-Oldak, the studys senior author. MMP-20 chops up proteins during the crystallization of enamel. Together with other enzymes, it gets rid of sludge so the enamel making cells in the body can add more mineral and make enamel, the hardest bioceramic in the human body.
Moradian-Oldak will couple the MMP-20 discovery with another study published Nov. 2 in the Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Informatics, which concluded an amelogenin-chitosan hydrogel could repair early tooth decay by growing an enamel-like layer that reduces lesions by up to 70 percent.
Recognizing MMP-20s function in biomineralization is one of the first steps to learning how dental enamel forms in nature, said Qichao Ruan, lead author of the hydrogel study and a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology at USC.
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