Medical approach to dental caries: fight the disease, not the lesion.

Dental caries is one of the most prevalent and costly diseases in the United States and throughout the world. Although the manifestation of the disease is the dissolution of tooth structure, the biological nature of the disease is a microbial infection. Traditional dentistry has been heavily focused on repairing damaged tooth structure via surgical approaches. The advancement of microbiology and engineering is bringing a medical revolution to dentistry. The on-going exciting progress in caries research has offered us great opportunities to better understand, detect, and monitor the disease. Most importantly, these new biological discoveries and technological developments allow us to address the etiological cause of the disease (microbial infection), which can lead to more effective treatments and prevention of dental caries.