Cavities. My eternal scourge
Is the clock finally running out on this annoyance
In 1985 Professor Jeffrey Hillman of the University of Florida. In 1985, was doing his thing. His thing, in this case, was surveying the bacterium and germs on the teeth of his graduate students.
It’s a living, I am told.
One grad student, name unknown, had something unusual. There is a microorganism strain called S. mutant and his or hers were variants of this common thing.
From that mouth, through decades of work hath come “Lumina” a genetically-modified strain of the bane of my existence, the microscopic thing that causes tooth decay bacterium, streptococcus mutans.
Normal S. mutans lives on your teeth and metabolizes any spare sugar that comes its way into the waste product lactic acid. If too much normal s. mutans gets together in one place, all the lactic acid dissolves the tooth’s enamel coating, and you could get a cavity cavities.
Lumina has four genetic modifications:
It produces a weak antibiotic, mutacin-1140, which kills competing oral bacteria.
It’s immune to mutacin-1140, so it doesn’t kill itself.
It metabolizes sugar through a different chemical pathway that ends in alcohol instead of lactic acid.
It lacks a peptide its species usually uses to arrange gene transfers with other bacteria.
The antibiotic helps it win the Darwinian competition in your mouth to become King Of The Oral Bacteria. The alcohol metabolism means it won’t produce lactic acid (and so won’t cause tooth decay). The peptide knockout prevents it from transferring genes back and forth with other bacteria that might either inactivate it or leak its advantage.1
How great is this?!?!? This is science. Toothbrushes? Toothpastes? They do have a certain anachronistic feel, don’t they?
Now, if you share my passion, or if you hate a certain dentist in your life then your next question is when can I put this laboratory engineered micro-organism into my mouth?
Well, it’s not cheap to put dentists out of business, and to develop drugs (even if that drug is really an organism), so the plan is to first sell Lumina in Honduras (bet you didn’t see that coming!) There’s a libertarian charter city there called PROSPERA, which allows the sale of any biotech product under an informed consent rule: as long as the company is open about risks and the patient signs a waiver saying they were informed, people can do what they want.
Phase 1: (January 2024) Sell to biohackers in Prospera for $20,000.
Phase 2: (2025??) Sell to ordinary people in the US for a few hundred dollars.
So, 2025 at the earliest when we should theoretically begin to say goodbye to cavities!
That’s a Good Goodbye.
