Edward Steager
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Dental plaque is a biofilm: a sticky community of bacteria that is hard to remove from tight spaces such as root canals and gum pockets. These biofilms cause persistent, costly oral infections.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
microrobotics
small-scale robots
magnetic robots
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Optimize magnetic control, bacteria-killing activity and tracking of CAR1s, aggregated iron oxide nanoparticle robots, for treating and retrieving root-canal biofilm, testing them in 3D-printed teeth, extracted teeth and pig jaws.
- Fabricate CAR2s by 3D micromolding polymers with embedded iron oxide nanoparticles, and test their ability to disrupt and retrieve mixed-species biofilm and release drugs at the root tip.
- Develop a handheld micro-robotic device that rapidly collects plaque biofilm from hard-to-reach periodontal sites, with automated collection and real-time detection of disease-causing bacteria.
- Train a temporal graph neural network, an AI model that tracks changing relationships over time, on the device's multimodal data to predict periodontal disease risk, shown on an interactive dashboard.
More about the research
The mouth's bacterial community, called the oral microbiome, is also increasingly linked to heart disease, neurological disease and cancer. Two projects use tiny magnetically driven robots to treat and sample oral biofilms. One also pairs robotic sampling with artificial intelligence (AI) to estimate disease risk.
Why it matters
Patients with root-canal infections and gum disease could benefit from automated tools that kill, remove and sample biofilm in places hand instruments reach poorly, and that deliver drugs on site. Robotic plaque sampling combined with AI risk prediction could support earlier detection of periodontal disease. It may also eventually help flag risks for oral-microbiome-linked conditions such as cardiovascular and neurological disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marisol Tellez Merchan
Temple University, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Build a Medical Continuity of Care Record that pulls up-to-date health measures from the Pennsylvania Health Share Exchange electronic records into dental school care at Temple.
Zezhang Wen
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-New Orleans, LA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify the transcriptional and post-transcriptional factors that control expression of brpA, a gene needed for biofilm formation in Streptococcus mutans, using molecular, biochemical and bioinformatics approaches.
Adam Lietzan
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Identify the cellular pathways that interleukin-37 (IL-37), an anti-inflammatory cytokine, changes in oral epithelial cells challenged with microbes, using in vitro and in vivo models.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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