Biomedicine in orthodontics: from tooth movement to facial growth.

Biomedicine has the potential to improve orthodontic and dentofacial orthopedic treatment significantly. The importance of biomedicine has grown as the result of three trends that have experienced rapid development in recent years: the increased molecularization of biology; the rise of computer modeling; and the greater application of experimentation to clinical settings. Despite this, the translation of new biologic knowledge to clinical practice in orthodontics and dentofacial orthopedics has been slow. Notably promising areas of orthodontic biomedical research can be recognized in diagnosis, treatment rationales, therapeutics, and monitoring. Despite facing significant challenges in all of these areas, some innovations have been rapidly adopted with minimal understanding of their biologic fundamentals while others are slow to be implemented in clinical settings. Issues related to this disparity can be identified but solutions are often less clear. Two future challenges will be highlighted: 1) the inadequacy of infrastructure and systems organization to support translation of bench science to the clinic; and 2) the inherent differences in the logic and assumptions of efficacy vs. effectiveness research.