Dental scanner allows researcher to sink his teeth into entrepreneurship
Traditionally, dentists have made dental impressions by having patients bite down on a moldable silicone material. Such impressions, however, can be messy and uncomfortable, and sometimes inaccurate. In the early 2000s, a group of researchers from MIT and business students from Harvard University began working to commercialize a novel handheld scanner — with MIT roots — that could digitally capture three-dimensional images of the inside of a patient’s mouth. Allowing fast, real-time digital dental impressions, this innovation was developed by Brontes Technologies, a startup co-founded by the team: MIT professor Douglas Hart, former MIT postdoc János Rohály, and two Harvard Business School graduate students. After just three years, manufacturing giant 3M acquired Brontes and all its technology for $95 million — one of the largest-ever acquisitions of a dental technology, Hart says. In 2008, 3M launched the team’s invention, dubbed the Lava Chairside Oral Scanner (or COS), which has now...