Never before has the Faculty of Dentistry received a large research grant from the Research Council of Norway. Our projects "Injectable biomaterials for dental tissue engineering (InjectTE)" and "Multispecies biofilm to investigate non-antibiotic therapies in dentistry (MISFAITH)" were given top score and was awarded 20 MNOK for five yeares. The funding is for the period 2022-2027.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)—bacteria’s development of resistance to antibiotics, the miracle drug of the last 100 years—is a growing global threat. The culprits are many, but the result is the same: bacteria acquire strengths that overpower antibiotic treatments and render them ineffective to useless. A 2019 study attributes 141,000 deaths in high-income countries directly to bacterial AMR. Two forces are propelling the spread of AMR. One is the weakening of treatments through the evolution of pathogens, accelerated by human behaviour. The other is an absence of pharmacological innovation to respond to such novel evolution. The overall result is an innovation ecosystem that is not staying ahead of the developing danger. Here will do a difference. In the current project we will present a new model that can investigate new technologies that reduce the use of antibiotics when removing bacteria on infected implants. Our new model will reduce the use of laboratory animals
Fig. 1. Untreated peri-implantitis can result in the failure of the dental implant (Colourbox).
MISFAITH is a multidisciplinary project assembling international leading researchers Malcolm L. Snead (Herman Ostrow Dental School, University of Southern California), Candan Tamerler (University of Kansas), Gary Drobny (University of Washington), Dirk Linke (IBV/MATNAT, UiO) and industrial partners Labrida AS and Corticalis AS
The projects, are led by Prof. Haugen.