One Good Thing

One Good Thing

Doing away with cavities is good.

Lumina toothpaste is being shipped. We celebrate it.

E.J.'s avatar
E.J.
Jun 16, 2025
∙ Paid

TL;DR

The long battlefield in the fight against cavities has shifted recently with the shipping of Lumina toothpaste. What is behind this shift? A small engineered bacterium, developed by Lantern Bioworks, called S. mutans bacterium which aims to put an end to cavities not by eliminating sugar (who wants that?), but by cleverly re-engineering the very bacteria that cause decay to produce harmless ethanol instead of corrosive lactic acid.

It’s a millennia old problem with a modern solution.

More after the break.

This is the stuff cavities are made of. Courtesy of Getty Images

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