An assessment of market opportunities for novel antimicrobial-silica microspheres for dental materials

以前的牙齿填充物周围的复发性蛀牙（龋齿），牙种植体周围的组织感染以及皮肤伤口感染都是卫生保健从业者面临的主要细菌感染相关挑战。这些挑战可以从局部、有针对性和长期应用抗菌材料中受益，以减少细菌负荷。然而，传统的抗菌牙齿填充物、种植体和伤口敷料只能提供短期效果，对抗菌药物使用量的控制很差。这些材料对复发性龋齿等疾病的效果有限，需要10年以上的长期治疗效果。**我们开发了一种正在申请专利的新型微球，该微球装载抗菌药物，具有非常长期的效果，并使用这些微球制造了一种新的抗菌复合牙科粘合剂。这种新型粘合剂，当应用于补牙界面时，能够通过杀死渗透到这一关键区域的细菌来防止蛀牙复发，同时不影响口腔中有益的口腔细菌。这种材料还可以防止牙种植体-牙龈界面的感染，以及用含有这些颗粒的敷料治疗的皮肤伤口的感染。**这份NSERC I2I市场评估提案将回答几个关键问题，包括潜在客户对关键挑战的看法、他们采用新技术的意愿、总市场规模和我们产品的感知价值。它还将确定我们需要克服的关键挑战，以开发这些新型复合粘合剂用于商业化。当我们扩大材料的生产规模并努力提供商业产品时，这些信息将至关重要。

Recurrent cavities (caries) around previous dental fillings, infection of tissues around dental implants, and infection of skin wounds all present major bacterial infection-associated challenges to healthcare practitioners. These challenges could benefit from local, targeted, and long-term application of antimicrobial materials to reduce bacterial load. However, traditional antimicrobial dental fillings, implants, and wound dressings offer only short-term effects, with poor control over the amount of antimicrobial used. These materials have limited effect on diseases like recurrent dental caries that require a long lasting therapeutic effect of over 10 years.**We have developed a patent-pending novel microspheres that are loaded with antimicrobial drug for very-long-term effect, and used these spheres to make a new antimicrobial composite dental adhesive. This new adhesive, when applied at the filling-tooth interface is able to prevent recurrent cavities by killing bacteria that infiltrate this critical area, while leaving beneficial oral bacteria in the mouth unaffected. This material could also prevent infection at the dental implant-gums interface, as well as infection of skin wounds treated with a dressing containing these particles.**This NSERC I2I Market Assessment proposal will provide answers to several key questions about potential customers' perceptions of key challenges, their willingness to adopt new technology, the total market size, and perceived value of our offering. It will also identify key challenges we will need to overcome to develop these novel composite adhesives for commercialization. This information will be critical as we scale up production of our material and work to provide a commercial offering.