During her thirty-year career as a dental hygienist, Ingrid Rodriquez noticed that the prevalence of oral and gum disease in Australia among her patients was highly disturbing.
She realised whatever the current orthodoxy is when it comes to keeping people's teeth and gums healthy, it wasn't working.
"The turning point was a patient called Stacy who turned up in my dental chair. She was 30 years old, she was in the corporate sector. And she rocked up in my dental chair and I had to do an assessment of her gums, and we had to diagnose her with advanced gum disease at the age of 30," Ingrid recalls.
"She turned up with the symptoms of waking up with blood in her mouth, on her pillow, she couldn’t date, if you could imagine with all this blood coming out. To have to diagnose a 30-year-old with advanced gum disease is quite gut wrenching."
After some fairly invasive - and expensive - treatment to try and deep clean her gums, Ingrid set out to build a company that could create a product for patients in both the developed and developing world that treated the root cause of the issue.
"I was like how is this possible in Australia? And I did some research and found that 30 per cent of Australians don’t access dental treatment because they can’t afford it. And I thought - what does this mean for the developing world? And that’s where I started to do a deep dive into what’s actually happening here."
Much like how period dignity is a foundational human right and need for girls and women to be empowered in other aspects of their life, gum and oral health is interconnected with many other aspects of health.
What starts in the mouth as inflammation can spread to other parts of the body and contribute to diabetes, Alzheimers, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Ingrid says a wholesale understanding of how the oral microbiome works and interacts with the rest of the body is needed. Her company Eikonic hopes to play a role in that paradigm shift.
Founded in 2011, Eikonic's core product is a paste that rebuilds the tooth structure. The secret ingredient? Gold - a precious metal that Ingrid says "works intelligently and intuitively with bacteria."
MP readers, meet Ingrid, a truly mission-driven entrepreneur.
Missing Perspectives: Ingrid, thank you so much for taking the time to meet today. Let's get right into the product. What’s the core technology behind Eikonic the paste? And how does the product differ to say Colgate toothpaste you can buy off the shelves?
First of all, we use gold in our products, which no one else does. Gold is an intelligent material in its own right. It almost knows how to behave with certain bacteria - it’s very selective. The good thing about our creams is that it helps support the good bacteria in the mouth - it’s not focused on killing everything off. Most of our competitors have got this shotgun approach to killing off bacteria.
We’re not coming from that angle, because we know we need to have a balance of good and bad living in the mouth to create that healthy ecosystem. It’s like the gut. If you kill everything off there’s your gut microbiome out of whack, and people get sick.
It’s no different with the mouth. If we’re throwing all these chemicals in the mouth killing everything off, it can’t be healthy. No wonder the mouth is in a state of disease.
And how is that disease - there’s obviously the bleeding and those effects - but how is that connected to overall human health?
Gum disease in particular is linked to diabetes and heart disease and adverse pregnancy outcomes for women. It’s been linked to Alzheimers. In particular, I’ve had a friend share that his brother in law got sent to hospital. Went fishing one day, wasn’t feeling well, woke up with stroke symptoms. They found I think a dozen abscesses in his brain, and it was all linked to a tooth abscess that he had. He’s in quite a serious condition now in hospital.
I always say to people never underestimate the impact your oral health can have on the rest of your body. There’s an inflammatory relationship that happens between those diseases. In particular diabetes and HB1EC. That’s a hemoglobin reading.
I personally had an experience with a doctor ten years ago with an insulin pump. I had to diagnose her with advanced gum disease, and said until you sort this out, your blood sugar levels won’t resolve. I had to educate her on the relationship between the two. And between session 1 and session 2 - her blood sugars started to regulate. And she couldn’t believe it.
Just because there’s not morbidity attached to gum disease, it’s very, very serious when you have these other diseases.
What R&D went into the product process? And how did you fund that? Who was the team?
Serendipity, luck, I don’t know what you call it. I was in the UK for six months, I had an intuitive feeling I needed to be there. I’m very intuitive in business, sometimes it makes no sense to others, but I trust myself.
I was sort of meeting with potential investors, and then one day I remember being at Paddington train station because things were not moving the way I wanted them to move, and I broke down and cried. I was so upset.
I took a trip down to Swansea, because they had the centre for nanohealth at Swansea University. Long story short - they approached me and said do you need help putting your formulation together? And I said yeah, I’ve got my recipe just need someone to do it. And they said we can access some funding, but you need a British company. And I said funny that, I set one up three weeks ago. So in we went, contracts are done within a week at the university, they allowed me to be onsite with them, they assigned to me a chemical engineer.
I said this is my recipe, it was like playing in a playground. Once we started testing it on bacteria, it came to life.
Ah that must have been such an amazing moment.
It was. Out of 2014. And I had a beautiful advisor - an engineer called Alexander Gosling - who is still by my side today. And Alexander said - how do you know it’ll work? And I said I just know it works. And when it did - it was exciting. He stayed by my side even when I didn’t have anything tangible.
Who else is in the team?
I’m a sole founder, but I have a team of advisors around me, but we’re about to embark on a capital raise - because I want to start bringing [onboard] that human capital as it’s gotten to a point where it’s too big for me to run myself. My team are these universities - the UK, Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology - their teams have bent over backwards because they believe in the mission and human impact. People say universities are hard to work with - that hasn’t been my experience.
Who are your customers and how has your customer base evolved over time?
It’s quite a unique product in the sense that the core technology in our first product, the tooth cream, is a platform that is designed to be embedded into different products, for example, a mouthwash, chewing gum, tooth powder. The reason why I’ve done that is so that we can be intentional again and sensitive to different cultures and age groups. I think the biggest problem with healthcare products on the market is that it’s a one size fits all. But the reality is that the health needs of a child are very different to the needs of someone living in an aged care home. We’re also looking at potentially pivoting the product to cater to perimenopausal and menopausal women.
So you’ve got the Eikonic product, you know it works, that’s strong. Sounds like the next question is around finding the market. I guess that’s the entrepreneur’s dilemma - you need to think about revenue, sales, and what the customer wants.
I spoke to a marketer, and she thought that going down the route (older women) was wise. I have plans for geriatric dental care, for women, for children, for men, they’ll all be variations of the core technology.
I was very inspired in 2012 by Richard Branson’s “screw it, just do it” - and I literally at that time mapped it all out. And Eikonic was like Virgin and I had all these things coming off it. But it’s all to make a difference in some shape or form, challenge the status quo, and create a paradigm shift.
There are products we use to treat gum disease like chlorhexidine that we use religiously to treat gum disease, but chlorhexidine actually promotes the formation of calculus that causes hard plaque that causes inflammation. So why TF are we using this in the mouth?
When would you encounter this?
When you’re having your teeth cleaned, they squirt it down the gums. I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s the best of what we’ve got.
Better than is not necessarily the best. You can have a better job than you used to have, or a better partner, but why not step back and think about what would be the best?
I think the statistics speak for themselves. You know what else is causing it? Yes, there’s lack of education. 100 per cent, we should be educating at that grassroots level about the mouth / body connection. About how what’s going on in your mouth can impact the rest of your body. There’s a big educational component that’s missing for all age groups, and all age groups need a different kind of method. Tooth decay and gum disease are in the top ten diseases in the world, but they’re silent diseases.
You don’t really know about it until you have a lot of pain, or bleeding. They think it’s nothing. No, it’s not nothing. There’s inflammation in the body. But because they’re silent diseases, they don’t really flare up until it’s very late. It’s deceptive - ‘oh I don’t have pain’. Well, look at an X-ray - see that dark patch - that’s decay.
Thank you Ingrid!
Ingrid Rodriquez on ... 3 things she wished everyone knew about oral health
Ya need a balance of good and bad bacteria
"We need a balance of good and bad bacteria Killing everything off is not the solution. Mouth rinses, for instance, are really bad."
The mouth-body connection is real
"What’s going on in the mouth impacts other systems in the body, and gum disease is linked to chronic diseases like heart disease and Alzheimers."Prevention is better than the cure
"We all have to be responsible for our own oral health... It has to start with us."