Requirements for New Dental Materials: Clinically Relevant Testing

New dental materials are brought to the market at a rapid pace, often with promises of enhanced clinical performance over existing materials. A battery of testing methods is available for evaluating these materials to ensure that they are safe and to gauge their potential clinical effectiveness. While most would agree that clinical studies are the best screening methods for new materials, they are expensive and time consuming, mitigating the possibility that new products will always be adequately clinically tested before marketing. Thus, it becomes important to identify in vitro test methods that correlate with clinical performance. This presentation will discuss the difficulties encountered in trying to predict clinical performance from in vitro tests, and will identify those methods for which some evidence of relevance exists.