Dr Leanne Teoh’s PhD research has led to the successful commercialisation of a safe medicine management and prescribing tool, MIMS Drugs4dent®.
Working as both a pharmacist and dentist, Dr Leanne Teoh (BDSc 2008, PhD 2021) recognised there was no dental-specific resource to help dentists prescribe and manage medications safely at point-of-care.
“Dental patients can present at clinic with pre-existing conditions like diabetes and heart conditions or they might be pregnant or elderly,” says Dr Teoh.
“Many of them will already be taking medications which have the potential to interact with drugs prescribed by their dental practitioner, or medications that may affect the outcome of dental procedures. For example, some medications impact healing by causing immune suppression or increasing a patient’s risk of bleeding, and this needs to be considered before invasive dental procedures such as tooth removal.”
Focusing on this resource gap, Dr Teoh embarked on a PhD that researched dental prescribing practices and barriers to appropriate prescribing in Australia. She found dentists didn’t always feel confident understanding patient medications and how those medications could affect dental treatment.
Dr Teoh developed Drugs4dent® to close this information gap. She gathered input from around 50 dental practitioners and dental specialists during the testing and design process to ensure the digital tool was practical and relevant.
It is also designed to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescribing and improve dental guideline compliance. Antibiotics prescribed by dentists account for 10 per cent of all antibiotics prescribed worldwide, but up to 55 per cent of those medications are prescribed unnecessarily by dentists in Australia.
Supported by a Dean’s Innovation Grant and Early Career Researcher grant from the University of Melbourne and, more recently, an Investigator grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council, MIMS Drugs4dent® was launched in August 2024.
It is now available through MIMS, the leading supplier of medicines information to Australian healthcare professionals.
"All research within Melbourne Dental School can have impact on the profession in some way — impact takes different forms. It might be in the area of knowledge, policy, changing public debate or commercialisation and innovation. I’d encourage all PhD students to think about the potentially bigger implications of the work they do," says Dr Teoh.
When I started my PhD, I didn’t imagine that it would result in a commercial product but collaboration, support and the knowledge base I developed enabled commercialisation to occur. The past years have taken me on a very exciting and unexpected journey.
Discover more about Graduate Research: mdhs.unimelb.edu.au/research/research-training