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The Penn Center for Innovation and Precision Dentistry (CiPD) is the nation’s first interdisciplinary initiative bringing together oral-craniofacial health sciences and engineering.
An institutional partnership formalizing the Center’s dual affiliation between Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Dentistry makes CiPD unique.
With a precise and controlled movement, the microrobots clean a glass plate of a biofilm in this time-lapse sequence. (Image: Geelsu Hwang and Edward Steager)
In just two years since CiPD was founded, the results of this newly conceived research partnership have proven its worth: microrobots that clean teeth for people with limited mobility, a whole new understanding of bacterial physics in tooth decay, enzymes from plaque-degrading plant chloroplasts, promising future for lipid nanoparticles in oral cancer treatment, and new techniques and materials to restore nerves in facial reconstructive surgery.
In addition, CiPD is training the next generation of dentists, scientists, and engineers through an NIH/NIDCR-sponsored postdoctoral training program, as well as industry fellowships.
The center’s founding co-directors, Kathleen J. Stebe, Richer & Elizabeth Goodwin Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Michel Koo, professor of orthodontics at Penn Dental Medicine, published an editorial in Journal of Dental Researchsetting a banner for CiPD’s mission and encouraging others to mirror its method.
Both call on “the academic community to adopt a coordinated approach that brings together dentistry and engineering to support research, training, and entrepreneurship to address unmet needs and drive oral health care innovation.”
“What people need to remember is that oral health is basically general medicine from the neck up,” says Stebe. “The word ‘dentistry’ may bring to mind cavities and plaque. But in the oral-craniofacial space, we’re also talking about cancer, neurology, viruses, inflammation, facial restoration, tissue regeneration, complex microbiomes – the list is extensive.”
Koo and Stebe both emphasize that to be effective, dental care must also be affordable. “Affordability and accuracy are the two pillars of oral health care,” says Koo. “Most diseases in this area are clustered in populations of lower socioeconomic status, while individual susceptibility to diseases and cancers requires precision and personalized medicine.”
Read more at Penn Engineering Today.
