Dental implants have gotten much better, but they still just sit there, in your mouth, like polished pegs. Your real teeth — you can feel them chatter, grind, and push onto stuff. When you chew, you feel it with your tiny nerve endings.
For decades, this sensory feedback — known as dental proprioception — has been lost to implants. Until now. A team from Tufts University has just unveiled a bioengineered dental implant that doesn’t just fill the gap but also blends in with your sensory connections.
First, let’s get something straight: traditional implants are mechanical marvels. Typically made of titanium and topped with ceramic, they’re surgically anchored directly into your jawbone. Once healed, they stay put for decades.
But here’s the problem: in anchoring directly to the bone, implants bypass the soft tissue that naturally connects real teeth to your jaw. That soft tissue — the periodontal ligament — is loaded with nerve endings. It lets you feel the difference between a walnut and a jellybean. Lose it, and you lose that whisper of feedback that makes chewing precise and speech fluid. It’s a bit like having noise-cancelling headphones for your mouth.
Now, researchers want to bring back the feel of real teeth with a new generation of implants. They’ve designed an implant wrapped in a biodegradable, memory-foam-like nanofiber coating. Inside that coating are stem cells and a potent growth protein (FGF-2). This protein nudges those cells to become nerve tissue and directs the implant to grow.
The idea is to re-create the missing nerve link — the feedback loop that once kept your bite in sync. But the team didn’t stop at making the implant feel more natural. They changed how it’s installed, too.
Changing dental implants
Traditional implants require drilling into the jawbone — a procedure that is painful, can damage nerves, and takes months to fully heal. The Tufts implant, by contrast, uses a “press-fit” technique. Think of it like inserting a memory foam plug: it goes in smaller than the space it’s meant to fill, then slowly expands to snugly match the contours of the socket. You don’t need any drills and there’s less trauma involved with the procedure.
For now, the method has only been tested on rats, not on humans. Six weeks after the implants were installed, they were still secure and showed no sign of rejection. Micro-CT scans showed that a tiny, uniform gap (0.7–0.9 mm) exists between the implant and the surrounding bone. Instead of fusing directly to bone like traditional implants, these sit within a soft-tissue pocket. That’s the magic: that soft-tissue layer is where the nerve connections are expected to grow back.
The next step is to see if those newly grown nerves actually work — by measuring brain activity in response to bite pressure or temperature.
If that checks out, the team plans to move on to larger animal models — likely pigs or dogs, which have more human-like teeth — and eventually clinical trials in humans.
A game changer for dentistry
Don’t expect to see this technology pop up at a dentist near you in a year or two. But if this does work, it could be a game-changer.
About 178 million Americans are missing at least one tooth. By 2026, nearly a quarter of the U.S. population is expected to have at least one dental implant. Worldwide, the implant industry is projected to top $13 billion.
These new implants are not just about comfort, either. Without proprioception, patients often bite harder than they need to, risking fractures or jaw issues. Subtle speech changes can occur. The feedback loop between jaw muscles, teeth, and brain is broken. And we’re only beginning to understand how that affects digestion, eating behavior, and long-term oral health. Some researchers even link impaired oral sensation to changes in brain regions tied to speech, swallowing, and memory. It’s a frontier in neuroscience and prosthodontics.
This isn’t the only exciting discovery in the field. In Japan, researchers have made progress on regrowing human teeth. Another approach aims to regrow human teeth in pigs. But these approaches will take quite some time to develop as well, if they turn out to be successful at all. In the meantime, it looks like we’ll still be using implants for some time.
These implants may soon become much more than just plumbing and scaffolding. They will be part of a sensing, communicating, adapting system. This smart implant doesn’t just restore function — it tries to connect an implant to the body. Literally.
The study was published in Nature Scientific Reports.
