In a laboratory in Sorocaba, interior São Paulo, researchers have turned an unexpected ingredient—the sticky latex of a jackfruit—into a potential remedy for a disease that affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Scientists from the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) have developed a biomaterial combining jackfruit latex, pomegranate peel extract, and simvastatin that shows genuine promise in treating periodontitis, a chronic inflammatory disease that silently destroys the tissues supporting teeth and leads to tooth loss.
Periodontitis is a relentless condition. It begins with infection and inflammation, but unlike simpler dental problems, it progressively erodes the bone holding teeth in place—a process conventional treatments can only slow, not reverse. Standard approaches aim to control infection and stop the damage, but they do little to regenerate the lost tissue. Other techniques, like guided tissue regeneration and bone grafting, exist, but their results are unpredictable and often underwhelming. This gap in treatment is why Professor Eliana Aparecida de Rezende Duek and her team at FCMS began exploring natural biomaterials that could work differently—not just fighting the disease but actively healing what it destroys.
The jackfruit latex caught their attention because of its unusual adhesive properties. Unlike oral medicines that wash away or get swallowed, this sticky substance could stay put at the problem site, releasing therapeutic compounds slowly and directly where needed. "We began to view latex extracted from jackfruit as an interesting alternative, as it has adhesive properties," Duek explains. "This led us to believe that it could remain longer at the site affected by periodontitis, promoting a more targeted release of therapeutic compounds and potentially reducing the need for systemic antibiotic use."
To that adhesive base, they added pomegranate peel extract—long used in traditional medicine and now recognized by science for its antimicrobial power when applied to skin or tissue. Then came simvastatin, a statin-based drug already known to trigger bone formation. The combination created a mucoadhesive matrix that attacks the disease at its site rather than throughout the whole body. This local approach matters because simvastatin taken orally gets trapped in the liver, with only trace amounts reaching affected tissues—a limitation that forces doctors to prescribe high doses with troubling side effects, including muscle damage.
The researchers carefully extracted latex from fresh jackfruit, purified it, and incorporated the pomegranate extract. They then tested the material's physical and biological properties before running an in vitro trial using human stem cells derived from fat tissue. They tested simvastatin at three concentrations—0.3%, 0.6%, and 1.2%—all safe and stable within the gel. Every concentration worked. Within 14 days, the cells showed increased bone formation, with an even stronger effect by day 21. The results were, as Duek puts it, "very encouraging."
"We observed that the developed biomaterial has great potential for future applications in treating periodontitis and in other areas as well, especially since it involves a material that has received little attention in the scientific literature for biomedical use," she says. But the team isn't stopping here. New studies are already underway to rigorously test safety and effectiveness before any clinical use. For millions living with periodontitis, that careful next step feels like genuine hope.