Researchers have grown a tooth on a chip and are ready for important discoveries.

Experiments on living organs are often ineffective, since the latter quickly become unusable. However, scientists from the University of Oregon managed to make a real breakthrough in dentistry: they created a fully functional analogue of a human tooth, growing it on a chip.

The tooth was made of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with a structure consisting of two chambers separated by a dentin fragment. For the experiment, a small part of the artificial material was taken and sandwiched between two transparent glasses. The tooth was placed on a chip, which made it possible to track ongoing changes in real time.

The surface of the clamps was covered with grooves through which fluid flowed into the dentin. All this has become an exact imitation of what happens in the human oral cavity, up to the penetration of various bacteria into the tooth.

According to scientists, the resulting technology can be used in medicine and is able to make more than one discovery. In fact, dentists have the opportunity to obtain artificial teeth that completely replicate the real ones in order to conduct all kinds of experiments on them to find new methods of treatment, etc.

In addition, thanks to this technology, in the future, oral prosthetics can become individual, taking into account the characteristics of each individual patient.