7/12/31

Why toothpaste?

Freaking toothpaste.

Still, Ash has a point.

I’d forgotten all about it, but way back in 2025, I had an idea.

Very dental and very nerdy.

Dentistry, like most modern medicine, is reactive.

Not anymore.

We know the levers.

Habits, diet, and the microbiome.

It’s that last bit I started poking at in ‘25.

Metagenomic shotgun sequencing.

I could use it to ID every bacterium, virus, and yeast in a mouth.

Gross, I know.

For just bacteria alone, there are 700+ species that can live in the mouth.

700.

And they share genes left and right like neighbors share sugar.

We knew the worst offenders.

But throwing antibiotics at the problem killed everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything downstream.

That’s like napalming your garden for a single weed.

The solution is targeted, patient-specific therapies.

I stopped in ‘25 because of the FDA, but they updated their protocols last year when in silico trials started matching in vivo trials.

So… toothpaste.

Custom toothpaste designed to remove only the bad pathogens and reinforce the good.

Insert eye-roll here.

We’ve got people here cracking fusion, cancer, and spaceflight, and I’m making toothpaste.

Jesus.

Well, lean into your strengths, I guess.

Ash dug up the old research, updated it, and now we’re trialing a bunch of different options.

I’ll have to visit the wet lab tomorrow.

That’s where everything gets tested in-vitro.

They’ve already got the cultures going.
We’ll start testing the custom toothpastes next week.