Had a deep cleaning (torture) session today, so I was looking for some good news on the dental front - cannot beat this one here:
"At a recent R&D symposium at Sandia National Laboratories' California site, bioresearcher Anup Singh wowed the audience with his tales of life in India and the non-traditional route that brought him to one of the nation's premiere defense laboratories. He was born in eastern India, not far from where Buddha attained enlightenment, but joked that that was all they had in common. After attending engineering school in Bombay and graduate school in North Carolina , he continued west to the DOE lab's Livermore campus.
Singh's current work at Sandia, however, is serious business for the millions of people in the United States who suffer from periodontal, or gum disease. He is the principal investigator on a project dubbed "microchip meets a dentist" that will result ultimately in a miniaturized device that can analyze saliva for gingivitis infection, which triggers inflammation leading to bone loss in the jaw. Roughly 20-40 million adults in the United States suffer from gum disease and the treatment cost may run into billions of dollars annually.
The portable system, says Singh, will employ electrokinetic separations and immunoassays for detecting biomarkers of periodontitis. Analyzing saliva has many advantages, including ease of sample collection (Singh and his colleagues affectionately call it the "spit project") and the potential for tracking other medical conditions."
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