Jon was tasked with finding a way to help dentistry students finish their degrees during the pandemic. His solution helped to develop a technique to reduce the risk of catching airborne viruses across the entire dentistry profession.

He enjoyed working on a research project that had an immediate need for successful results. Now he wants to continue with multidisciplinary projects that can show distinct societal impacts.

Jon is a Research Fellow in the School of Dentistry. He is working towards disease prevention and spread in dental surgeries.

Read more about Jon and his research.

Transcript

[Jon is sitting in front of a white background speaking directly to camera.]

Jon: Imagine you're baking a cake. You've got all your ingredients and you're mixing bowl and you've got your electric whisk. Now, we all know what happens when you put that whisk on at too high speed. You get covered in delicious cakey goodness and probably ruin that new white T-shirt in the meantime.

Now, imagine the blades of that electric whisk are turning 200,000 times per minute, and there’s potentially a deadly virus in that mixing bowl. Now, it's extreme, I know. But this is the problem facing dentistry during the pandemic. You do absolutely everything in your means and in your power to be able to protect yourself against getting that virus.

So, dentistry had to shut down. All the students at Leeds Dental Institute had no access to the vital clinical training that they needed. So, what could we do? I'm here to tell you about how we use the harmless virus to really kick start dentistry in the wake of the pandemic.

So meet this thing of nightmares. This is a dental training dummy and it's used to cut teeth and practice without any risk to our patients. And this one is specially adapted to be a bit more clinically realistic, featuring a tongue model and crucially, some salivary tubing to allow us to really make it salivate like a true patient.

Now, it's in that saliva where we were able to put our viral marker: A bacteriophage. Now, a bacteriophage is a tiny virus that only affects a very specific bacterial host organism. Now, the one we've chosen is very similar in size and structure to the COVID-19 virus, featuring a lot of those technical terms you'll have heard on the news about spike proteins and double stranded RNA.

Now we have our head, and we have our viral marker. So anywhere where you perform a dental procedure and that throws potential viral saliva into the air, you can cause a potential risk. So, we just need to detect it. And by growing the bacterial host organism on agar plates, anywhere where that virus settles and touches that bacterial cell, it's able to enter the cell where it multiplies and akin to a kind of microscopic xenomorph, it bursts free and is able to leave this characteristic ring of no growth that becomes our viral detection model.

So, we have our working model. Now we need to enter a live dental hospital clinic in the middle of a pandemic. So covered in head to toe in the personal protective equipment; gloves, masks, visors, aprons - We really sweated away for 5 hours at a time, surrounded by these yellow circular agar plates performing these common dental procedures.

Now, because the detection method requires the bacteria to be grown overnight, we don't know until the next day what the results are going to hold. Now, upon opening that incubator, I was really hit with a wall of cheesy whiff. Now, that was a good thing because I knew that my bacterial host detection organism was growing.

Now, upon turning over that agar plate, I could see the bacterial growth, but there was no sign of viral plaque of no growth. I turned over the next plate. The same thing. The next one, the next one. All 180 agar plates showed no sign whatsoever of viral detection. So, this was really disheartening. What was going wrong? This worked in pre experiments in the laboratory.

We went away and we had to workshop the ideas and we made a few tweaks. We came back the following week into the clinic and again sweated away for another 5 hours. Now, this time, the next day, was less excitement coming in to look at the results, but more anxiety fuelled. We really need this to work. Our students need to get back in the clinic and get through to graduation.

Upon turning over that plate, I could see the bacterial lawn, but I couldn't see any viral marker. My heart dropped. But this was what I really wanted to see. This was a negative control plate. And there it was on the next plate. That shining beacon of hope. That glorious ring of no growth that really told me that the virus had been detected.

So, we knew our model worked. So now the hard work kicked in. And over 100 clinic hours later and 3000 agar plates, we really tested a series of strategies to mitigate against viral aerosolization from common dental procedures. And what we found was, that with this new type of electric drill, where we could control the cutting speed and turn it down, and really crucially turn off the air coolant flow, we were able to reduce viral aerosolization by greater than 99%.

Now, this finding really piqued interest in the dental community to the point where I was invited to a personal presentation with the Chief Dental officer herself. It was in these discussions where we really were able to help inform updated national guidelines. And the thing that we're most proud of is actually getting our final year students back into the clinic with these electric dentist drills and really giving them the opportunity to get the experience that they needed to get through to graduation.

And what I'd like to think is that some of those students really celebrated their graduation with some delicious cake.