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Though it looks like a tiny purple blowtorch, a pencil-sized plume of plasma on the tip of a small probe remains at room temperature as it swiftly dismantles tough bacterial colonies deep inside a human tooth.

It’s not another futuristic product of George Lucas’ imagination - it’s the exciting work of USC School of Dentistry and USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers looking for new ways to safely fight tenacious biofilm infections in patients.

Biofilms are particularly tough bacteria and are protected in a matrix that means they cannot be eliminated with antibiotic treatments, so the team developed a cool plasma torch that hits the bacteria in a tooth’s root.

Parish Sedghizadeh, assistant professor of clinical dentistry and director of the USC Center for Biofilms, explained that biofilms are responsible for many hard-to-fight infections in the mouth, teeth and elsewhere. But in the study, biofilms cultivated in the root canal of extracted human teeth were easily destroyed with the plasma dental probe, as evidenced by scanning electron microscope images of near-pristine tooth surfaces after plasma treatment.

While many natural plasmas are hot, or thermal, the probe developed for the study is a non-thermal, room-temperature plasma that’s safe to touch. The researchers placed temperature sensors on the extracted teeth before treatment and found that the temperature of the tooth increased just five degrees after 10 minutes of exposure to the plasma, Jiang said.

Given that preliminary research indicates that non-thermal plasma is safe for surrounding tissues, Sedghizadeh said he was optimistic about its future dental and medical uses.

“Plasma is the future,” Sedghizadeh said. “It’s been used before for other sterilization purposes but not for clinical medical applications, and we hope to be the first to apply it in a clinical setting.”

“We believe we’re the first team to apply plasma for biofilm disinfection in root canals,” Jiang added. “This collaboration is unique. We’re attacking frontier problems, and we’re happy to be broadening our fields.”