Researchers at the University of Nottingham have developed a gel that could help damaged tooth enamel grow back. Enamel is the hard outer layer of a tooth, and unlike bone it cannot repair itself once it is lost.
The material is made from proteins that mimic the ones guiding enamel formation in early childhood. Applied to the tooth, it forms a thin coating that seeps into tiny cracks and acts as a scaffold.
Calcium and phosphate from saliva then collect on that scaffold and grow into new crystals lined up with the existing enamel, so the repair becomes part of the tooth rather than a layer sitting on top.
The team says dentists could apply it much like a routine fluoride treatment, although the gel itself contains no fluoride. It also showed promise on exposed dentine, the softer layer behind sensitive teeth. The work was published in Nature Communications.
