Dental Dean Update — Innovation or futurism?
Faculty of Dental Surgery
Regular readers of my blog articles will note that I have been writing on the theme of innovation which has been central to our College for many years. As summer turns to early autumn in the UK, companies and industries start to look forward to the following year, so I thought I should do likewise for 2025 and beyond.
PubMed reveals a list of 13,000 articles on a search for “innovation in dentistry” with topics such as machine learning, implant dentistry, destructive innovation in dentistry, material science, leadership, lasers, digital dentistry, nanotechnology, regenerative dentistry among many others listed by the US National Library of Medicine. Among this list, there are many articles discussing the scientific and clinical merits of the various topics and whilst I have not been able to read every article, a general scan shows the primary purpose of each is to educate and inform the dental community about the future.
Throughout my career, industry partnerships have been an important component of the dental landscape with the commercial sector feeding into dental clinical care ‘in surgery’ and direct to consumer, and for the development of many other facets of dentistry including research and development. In my career, the dental industry has been continually innovating. Existing companies have evolved over the years and dental industry start-up companies emerge all over the world on a continual basis. Interestingly, the UK and Ireland are among the leading European countries for the numbers of dental start-ups along with Pakistan and India. However, one country stands out as being way ahead, and the capital of global industry dental start-ups is the USA.
Why is the USA such a rich environment for dental industry start-ups? This primarily results from the continuing economic development and increasing urbanisation in the USA with the consequent increases in personal income and at the same time, per capita spending on health is continuing on an upward trajectory. Added to this is the increased awareness of health and wellbeing among the millennial generation along with increasing buying power and their drive to long-term health over financial wealth. The rest of the world continues to follow the trends in the USA with the dental services market has been estimated at $200Bn and growing at 3.3% annually.
Futurism is nothing new, it was an artistic and social movement originated in Italy in the early 20th century emphasising dynamism, speed, energy and power of machines and the vitality, change and restlessness of modern life. Dental futurists see the increasing shift of technology in dentistry to involve embedding digital technology across all aspects of dental care along with the development and implementation of artificial intelligence in the analysis of images and biological samples from patients.
The futuristic technological revolution is now taking place in dentistry along with the rest of healthcare. We already have advanced dental implants involving biologically active materials, cosmetic dentistry image analysis being developed in order to identify problems and assist with treatment planning, computer aided restoration fabrication, personalised treatment planning, tele-dentistry, immersive technology, patient ‘apps’ and a myriad of other devices and gadgets to improve the working lives of all across the dental industry. I am a big fan of digital technology and am fortunate to work with the like-minded team who have embraced, and have been supported in our dental hospital to embed CBCT, intraoral scanning, 3D facial imaging and 3D printing at an early stage with tele-dentistry, virtual orthodontic surgery planning, smart phone remote monitoring, and along with our postgraduate students, we have able to explore the relative merits of many of these technologies as well as make a contribution to the scientific advancements in dentistry.
As yet, robotic dentistry is limited to traditional laboratory procedures, but who knows, in time, it may well be that as with robotic surgery, the dental surgery may include an evidence-based robot as part of the team. One question that I have asked from time to time is “when will scientists be able to grow new teeth?”. Trials are ongoing and I for one will be interested to see the outcome.
Please feel free to get in contact dental@rcsed.ac.uk.
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