Personalizing Oral Healthcare: The Future of Dentistry on a Chip

Healthcare professionals may experience challenges with the efficacy of treatment as results could fluctuate depending on a patient’s genetic disposition. Personalized dentistry may present an impact and optimize patient care by adapting and personalizing treatment to the individual. The genomic revolution redesigns clinical care from being imprecise to making allowance for individuals variables in exogenous factors, genetics, and lifestyle. Personalized dentistry, medicine and healthcare is employing the use of genomic revolution to understand the human body to challenge and become the new gold standard approach to clinical trials rather than randomized controlled trials. One of the first successful microfluidic devices, Organ-on-a-chip (OOC) enabled researchers to study human physiology as it assisted in the progression of personalized medicine and dentistry leading to the creation of the Tooth-on-a-chip (TOC) device. The OOC device controls and replicates the model system and measures cell behavior, improving the process of treating specific organs and diseases. TOC provides an in-depth view on the arrangement of the tooth organ, improves the understanding of the inner processes of dental cells in their natural environment, and assists in understanding their reactions to biomaterials. Standard dental procedures involving restorative biocompatible materials such as adhesives, acid etches, and composite resins degrade over time and may lack biocompatibility depending on the patient’s oral microbiome. The TOC device has the potential to aid clinicians in making evidence based decisions for patient care based on their genetic makeup