Implementation

Background Overview

Though China’s medical services enhanced drastically over a few decades, dental caries – a disease of the oral cavity mainly caused by a bacteria known as Streptococcus mutans or S.mutans, is still undeniably a threat to people’s health, especially among children. According to the National Health Commission, the infection rate of Caries among 5-year-old children in 2017 is 70.9%, 5.8% higher than the rate a decade ago. At the same time, curing caries requires various time and resources.

In terms of prevention strategies for children under the age of 6, fluoride-containing toothpaste, though proven to be very effective, is not suggested as these children might accidentally swallow the toothpaste. Also, fluoride varnish is the most common method, where fluid that contains a high concentration of fluoride is applied directly to the teeth. Still, it needs to be implemented by professional doctors in hospitals to avoid potential side effects, showing it has limitations specifically for areas with a relatively lower level of medical resources. What’s more, fluoride greatly contributes to environmental pollution, affecting the quality of water and soil and causing damage to plants and animals.

In order to effectively prevent caries and ensure children from different economic conditions can maintain their oral hygiene while minimizing pollution to the environment, we designed the CariesFlor oral hygiene product.

Potential End-User

As the living standards rise, an increasing amount of people came to pay attention to personal health and living quality, thus increasing the demand for dental services. China’s dental care market was estimated to be worth over 100 billion RMB with a yearly increase of 11.1%.

Moreover, safer and eco-friendly products are strongly needed in the market due to children aged below 6 or even older are not suggested to use oral products containing strong chemical components, such as fluoride. But, the caries rate of deciduous teeth for children at the age of 5 is 71.9%, and 38.5% for permanent teeth at the age of 12. Which is a market vacancy for those who needed to prevent or cure caries at age 3-14.

Above all, our potential end-users would be kids aged from 3 to 14 to prevent and cure caries by using our biotechnology-based eco-friendly oral hygiene product.

At the same time, we will focus on cultivating the usage habits of target users. As we all know, old customers are the main source of stable income for enterprises and the cornerstone of enterprise development. According to the Pareto principle, 20% of loyal customers have a very significant impact on product sustainability. We hope to tap potential users and cultivate user habits through brand promotion and personalization, so as to convert potential users into loyal users.

Our Product

The ultimate goal of Caries Flor is to develop a product that could successfully resolve the problems of the current dental caries treatment market with features of convenience, universality, flouride-free and sustainability. Based on the interview with some experts, we decide mainly to produce two types of products toothpaste and mouthwashes. To appeal to children, we may also collaborate with candy brands, promoting brand awareness among children, and advocating for the controlled consumption of sweets.

Concept Map of Our Product - toothpaste and mouthwash

In addition, we also consider below four characteristics of our product:

Taking into consideration that though our consumers are children, the real customers who purchase the product would be the parents, offline locations, and online communities where parents usually concentrate are chosen to accurately orientate our real customers.

Core Biotechnology Principle

Phage lyase is a phage-encoded glycosidic hydrolase with the function of digesting the cell wall of bacterial host cells. Arabinose can be used to induce the expression of phage lyase. Dexanase can inhibit biofilms by hydrolyzing A-1, 6-glycosidic bonds. Dexanase A (DexA) can inhibit biofilm formation and destroy preformed biofilms in vitro.

Experimental Design Map

Since a combination of DexA70 and antimicrobial agents will perform a better treatment, we transformed and expressed both ClyR and DexA70 into Escherichia coli strain Nissle 1917 in order to create an agent that is able to kill S. mutans, destroy existing biofilms, and inhibit the formation of biofilms, thus provide a more effective solution towards curing dental caries.

Strain functional test result: inhibition zone

As shown above, a transparent circle can be seen around the Oxford cup treated with DexA protein, indicating that the DexA protein can destroy or inhibit the biofilm produced by Streptococcus mutans.

Safety Consideration and Challenges

Laboratory safety is one of our major concerns in the team CariesFlor. We strictly follow the “Do Not Release Policy” and “Safety and Security Policies” listed by the Safety Security Committee and Responsible Conduct Committee. The biosafety level of our laboratory is grade 1 meaning that only low-risk microbes, which pose little to no threat of infection in healthy adults, are involved in our experiment. The microorganisms we used are non-pathogenic E. coli DH5a, E. coli Nissle 1917, and Streptococcus mutants, which have been proven to be not harmful to the human body.

Regarding the safety consideration of our product, per the previous introduction, our product will be edible in case of accidentally swallowing it. Firstly, it is fluoride-free and we will avoid using common ingredients that are toxic to the human organ system: zinc phosphate, PEG-12, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Propylene Glycol, Titanium Dioxide, and more. For the core element of our final product, the engineered bacteria, E. coli Nissle 1917 is the only non-pathogenic E. coli and it is a probiotic beneficial to the human body even for clinical use.

We also face some challenges. There are several products and brands, such as Lion and Yunnan Baiyao, that already has a stable affinity with customers in China. Therefore, our barriers to entering would be very high.

Another significant problem is that people would also have concerns about our product from a safety perspective. Although we have considered our product safety in the design and materials, we have not yet conducted any clinical trials to firmly prove that it is totally safe for the human body.

Future Plan

For our promotion and marketing plan, we combine multiple strategies of BTL (below the line), ATL (above the line), and IMC (Integrated Marketing Communication).

For BTL , we will choose children's training institutions, private dentistry, public primary schools, and children’s hospitals to cooperate with for promotion. Therefore we could raise awareness among parents about our product in credible ways.

For ATL, we will focus on the spread of knowledge, and emphasize our technological advancements through various social media, and marketing publications.

For IMC, our business strategy is to collaborate with different channels to widen our influence and expose our product to a wider audience.

We also have drafted our business plan so as to prepare our business implementation plan in the real world in the future. More details could be found on the Supporting Entrepreneurship page.

For product development, so far our engineered bacteria have been proven to successfully express DexA protein which is meant to destroy or inhibit the biofilm produced by Streptococcus mutans.

Per our initial design, our final engineered bacteria host is E. coli Nissle 1917. Therefore, we plan to extract our plasmid and transfer it into E. coli Nissle 1917 and conduct more tests for assessing its bacteriostatic effect.