> We are thus left with a product, Lumina, that cannot guarantee the prevention of future caries<p>"Guarantees" are not strictly needed. What matters most is whether there is a substantial reduction of future caries, not whether it makes you totally immune to it.<p>Say, if Lumina/BCS3-L1 "only" reduces cavities by 50%, it is already half as good (arguably) as a drug which prevented 100%. This would already be large progress for such a massive global problem. The article author does not seem to recognize the potential of such a drug.
It seems like FDA restrictions on clinical trials have really shot us all in the foot by depriving us the opportunity to collect data on this bacteria before it was made available as a supplement. There is clearly a demand for this product and it seems quite likely that Hillman et al could have gotten a cohort together to conduct a trial if they hadn't been faced with such extreme restrictions on testing. Why is informed consent not sufficient for participation in a RCT?
It may still take us some time to reach that goal, but the good news is that we have an effective solution available right now: keeping good oral hygiene is known to prevent both caries and gum disease, and takes less than 10 minutes a day for the average person.<p>If you need more information, we recently developed a free website to get you started:
<a href="https://lifelongsmiles.hk/" rel="nofollow">https://lifelongsmiles.hk/</a>
Wild, I first read about this twenty+ years ago, maybe thirty. Oragenics rang a bell, near some university in Florida?<p>Also, the New York Times magazine had a piece on the Prospera island in Central America last weekend, was interesting as well. Supposed to have fewer regulations but the previous government is trying to reclaim it.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-honduras-crypto.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-hondura...</a>
OP reads like a lazy ripoff of earlier debates around Lumina, principally <a href="https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/please-dont-take-luminas-anticavity" rel="nofollow">https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/please-dont-take-luminas-a...</a> , which I don't see acknowledged or linked at all.
> in fact, it forms less than 2% of all the bacteria that cause caries<p>I tracked down the chain of citations here. The directly cited article (<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.81" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.81</a>) says the following:<p>"These caries ecological concepts have been confirmed by recent DNA- and RNA-based molecular studies that have uncovered an extraordinarily diverse microbial ecosystem, where S. mutans accounts for a very small fraction (0.1%–1.6%) of the bacterial community implicated in the caries process.[20]"<p>Note the sudden conversion of "implicated in the caries process" to "cause caries".<p>The next step in the citation chain is <a href="https://www.cell.com/trends/microbiology/abstract/S0966-842X(14)00225-X" rel="nofollow">https://www.cell.com/trends/microbiology/abstract/S0966-842X...</a>.<p>"In recent years, the use of second-generation sequencing and metagenomic techniques has uncovered an extraordinarily diverse ecosystem where S. mutans accounts only for 0.1% of the bacterial community in dental plaque and 0.7–1.6% in carious lesions[14,15]."<p>Now the claim is merely one of prevalence!<p>The next steps in the citation chain, <a href="https://karger.com/cre/article-abstract/47/6/591/85901/A-Tissue-Dependent-Hypothesis-of-Dental-Caries" rel="nofollow">https://karger.com/cre/article-abstract/47/6/591/85901/A-Tis...</a> and <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0047722" rel="nofollow">https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...</a>, do seem to plausibly provide evidence that there are other mouth-colonizing bacteria which would perform the same function as S. Mutans when it comes to causing caries, such that fully eliminating S. Mutans probably wouldn't eliminate caries entirely.<p>But, importantly, the citation in the McGill article doesn't much support the original claim, and this citation chain could easily have bottomed out in a completely different set of results which didn't happen to lend some (weak) evidentiary support to the high-level claim.<p>Also importantly, this article is committing the sin of figuring out some reasons why a treatment might not be perfectly effective in all cases, and implicitly deciding that justifies ignoring any non-total benefits (i.e. cases where S. Mutans would have been counterfactually responsible for causing caries, that could be prevented). Questions that would have been appropriate, but were apparently uninteresting:<p>"Does this intervention also happen to chase out other acid-producing bacteria that fulfill a similar ecological niche as S. Mutans?"<p>"What percentage of caries cases would be prevented by chasing out just S. Mutans with this intervention, while leaving other acid-producing bacteria untouched?"<p>Likely this is because answers to those questions would not really have changed the bottom line. That bottom line was written by the "unanswered" safety concerns (reasonable in the abstract, less obviously reasonable in this specific case). All of the listed safety concerns have evidence pointing in various directions. Very little of that evidence is listed, probably because it's not in a format that's legible to scientific institutions. The article does note, earlier on, "The toxicity of this Mutacin-1140 compound had not been tested. What would be the consequences of millions of bacteria in the mouth releasing this compound? The answer wasn’t clear, even though the archetypal compound in the family Mutacin-1140 belonged to was known to be very safe." This is obviously relevant evidence about the safety of Mutacin-1140. _How much_ evidence? Unasked, unanswered. (I have no idea how predictive the safety of other compounds in the same family is of another unstudied compound in that family, I'm not a biologist. But this is not an _unanswerable_ question.)<p>(Marginal conflict of interest: I know the Lumina founder socially. I have no financial interest in that venture or any of his other ventures. I have not taken Lumina myself.)
What i don't understand, is why not do animal studies?<p>Like sure that won't answer all questions, but it seems like it would shed some light on if other bacteria cause cavities or not, and if nothing else a basic starting point.
Anecdotal of course but because of my long-covid I have been taking a ton of Vitamin K2 over the past few years.<p>And all my teeth aches are gone, one less problem to worry about.<p>This matches reports by others that K2 seems to pull calcium out of your saliva and into your gums/teeth where it should be and makes them stronger. Maybe. It does seem to keep teeth more "squeaky clean".<p><a href="https://google.com/search?q=vitamin-k2+squeaky+clean+teeth" rel="nofollow">https://google.com/search?q=vitamin-k2+squeaky+clean+teeth</a>
cui bono?<p>how are you going to make any progress if you block research and experimentation consistently into areas that conveniently line the pockets of the state-protected dental guild?
Or, just use oil pulling with coconut oil. simple, natural and easiest way to reverse and prevent cavities. keeping the oil in the mouth for 20 minutes (before spitting out into the sink) is also a great way to maintain silence, and develop awareness of oral process, as you can't swallow.<p>More generally, am highly skeptical of this whole genetic modification drive for replacement of undesirable creatures like mosquitos and screw worms and now bacteria. Sure, sounds like a great idea and may work for the advertised benefits, but look who's funding it and how keen they are on developing vectors to human blood and what other tampering may occur that would be undetectable to anyone without millions of dollars of sequencing equipment. It fits in with the biosynthetic technology drive towards transhumanism alongside nanotechnology, worth researching before jumping on the "Homo Deus" bandwagon that paints us as 'hackable animals' whose soul is due to be extinct (quoting the top transhuman posterchild N. Harari). Worth deeply investigating the other side of the story, most clearly outlined by Prof. Anita Baxas, but also see Dr. Edward Group, Dr Ana Mihalchea, Karen Kingston and Dr. David Nixon.
Wow, the FDA is worse than useless. So much regulatory red tape. These guys had every single reasonable safeguard in place and the FDA kept putting requirement on top of requirement until literally no one would qualify for the study.<p>20-30 years later and humanity has had precisely zero benefit because of the FDA's simply absurd, technically impossible level of overcaution in this scenario.<p>It is incredible how much medical innovation is being held back because of these sort of politics. I hope the people that constantly cheer on more regulation or the FDA itself take a look at cases like this and hundreds of other similar cases where companies have simply given up on safe, promising approaches due to the regulatory red tape.