Designing and testing regenerative pulp treatment strategies: modeling the transdentinal transport mechanisms

The need for simulation models to thoroughly test the inflammatory effects of dental materials and dentinogenic effects of specific signaling molecules has been well recognized in current dental research. The development of a model that simulates the transdentinal flow and the mass transfer mechanisms is of prime importance in terms of achieving the objectives of developing more effective treatment modalities in restorative dentistry. The present protocol study is part of an ongoing investigation on the development of a methodology that can calculate the transport rate of selected molecules inside a typical dentinal tubule. The transport rate of biological molecules has been investigated using a validated CFD code. In that framework we propose a simple algorithm that, given the type of molecules of the therapeutic agent and the maximum acceptable time for the drug concentration to attain a required value at the pulpal side of the tubules, can estimate the initial concentration to be imposed.