Oral cancers can be easy to miss, which is why Dr. Petra Wilder-Smith, director of dentistry at the Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic, has worked more than a dozen years on a camera to detect oral lesions. Photo by Steve Zylius / UC Irvine

A leader in a movement to rewrite oral and oropharyngeal cancer outcomes, Dr. Petra Wilder-Smith has spent the last two decades working on devices for early detection.

Now, the director of dentistry at the UCI Health Beckman Laser & Medical Clinic has developed a camera capable of screening for cancer inside the mouth. The commercially viable intraoral camera was created in collaboration with Rongguang Liang at the University of Arizona’s Wyant College of Optical Sciences.

For clinicians, says Wilder-Smith, this breakthrough device "will eliminate the guesswork in interpreting clinical findings, leading to earlier diagnoses and improved patient outcomes.”

Oral cancers easy to miss

The current method for detecting oral cancer involves a dental professional looking inside the mouth and feeling for lumps. But oral cancer lesions present in many different, easy-to-miss forms.

Since treatment is planned around an oral biopsy, it’s best to be able to identify and take a sample from the most dangerous part of the lesion.

That can be difficult to do, says Wilder-Smith, who is also a professor of medicine at the UC Irvine School of Medicine.

“There’s everything from little dots with severe cancer to little dots that are healthy and little areas that are in between,” she says. “Just by looking, I don’t know where to biopsy because I can’t tell where the most severe disease is.”

Camera boosts detection

In tests, the intraoral camera developed with Liang increased the accuracy of oral cancer detection from between 40% to 60% of lesions to a detection rate of 87% to 93%. This will be a substantial change for dentistry, says hygienist Cherie Wink, a researcher at the laser institute and an instructor for San Joaquin Valley College’s dental hygiene program.

Work to develop the device began in 2008 with grant funding from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. Through the years, there have been 10 prototypes. One was smartphone-based and connected to a camera that could take images of oral lesions. A final prototype is being tested and fine-tuned for use. The next step is to evaluate it for manufacturing and commercial use.

Recently, UC Irvine and the University of Arizona were able to secure a patent for the device with the help of UCI Beall Applied Innovation, which oversees the university's patent and licensing efforts. Alvin Viray, Beall's associate director of licensing, is proud to be part of the anticancer camera project.

“Dr. Wilder-Smith has been nothing short of exceptional,” Viray says. “Her development of an imaging device for oral cancer detection is both innovative and commercially valuable, while promising to make a profound impact on public health.”

Viray is currently in discussions to license the intraoral camera and Wilder-Smith is set to seek investors for further development and manufacturing.

Taking aim at oral cancers

Throughout her career at the Beckman institute, Wilder-Smith has also worked on many other devices. She was part of a team that redesigned dental tools to prevent the spread of cold and flu viruses as well as other transmissible illnesses through aerosol emissions.

She has also been involved in studies linking topical oral treatments to changes in the microbiome and the gastrointestinal tract, which can have far-reaching consequences for whole-body health.

In 2023, she was named Innovator of the Year by UCI Beall Applied Innovation in recognition of her wide-ranging collaborations on light-based approaches to oral health. She was cited for her work in periodontology, dental decay and remineralization, as well as her innovations in therapeutic devices and applications.

Her main focus now is oral cancer.

“Quite simply," Wilder-Smith says, "my goal is to improve oral cancer outcomes because it’s one of the only major cancers whose outcomes are still getting worse.”