American Eagle and Dr Anthony Mak team up to create new instrument range

American Eagle Instruments Inc. has teamed up with Sydney dentist Dr Anthony Mak to create a new range of instruments perfectly suited to placing composite resin restorations. American Eagle is a leading global manufacturer of dental hand instruments and related supplies based in Missoula, Montana, USA.

"American Eagle approached me to come on board as their key opinion leader during IDS in 2019," Dr Mak said. "I knew American Eagle as a great company with great instruments, so I said I would love to be involved. They were particularly interested in working together on the development side of things.

"American Eagle have always been well-known for their perio instruments and now they're looking to build up their restorative product portfolio. So they offered me the opportunity to develop a set of restorative instruments designed for general dental practices.

"I said that if I was going to do that, I wanted to develop something that was simple, rather than a huge range of lots of different instruments designed for a really fine niche. My idea was to develop a set of instruments that was going to cover 90% of the composite restorative needs of the general practitioner.

"And they loved that idea."

Dr Mak then set about reviewing American Eagle's existing range of restorative instruments and seeing what needed to be done in order to meet his goal of developing 5 instruments for 90% of indications.

"Together with American Eagle, we looked at their current portfolio. The range was already very good and we just needed to tweak some of the blades and the tips and package them together so that it would fit within five instruments," Dr Mak said. "We selected some of the instruments we felt would be the most useful or similar to what we'd been using in the past and really liked.

"Obviously, each instrument has two ends, so some existing instruments had one really useful end while the other end wasn't so useful.

"We were then able to modify some of the ends how we wanted and then we selected handles. We liked a wider handle because of the weight and the balance of it and we wanted to use stainless steel because we want these instruments to be really long lasting.

"And finally we wanted all the instruments coated with American Eagle's amazing patented XP® Sharpen-Free technology that is designed to eliminate the need to re-sharpen instruments.

"We ended up with five instruments which we felt would indeed cover the majority of the requirements for placing anterior and posterior composites in day-to-day general practice."

The new range of instruments designed by Dr Mak is titled the American Eagle M5 Restorative Series amd comprises the M5-Sculpt, M5-Anterior, M5-Pack, M5-Carve and M5-Mini.

"Finally, we were able to use one of American Eagle's stainless steel cassettes to package and protect the instrument set. The cassettes are really low profile so you can fit multiple cassettes in the autoclave easily. The idea was that every time a dentist would be doing any sort of restorations in composite, they would just use this kit together with an exam kit and you would have everything you need."

Dr Mak road-tested all of the instrument designs in his practice to ensure their efficacy before giving the final green light.

"This was a great opportunitity to get involved in product development and this year-long project resulted in a very useful outcome. Hopefully I can do more of this in the future and share what I've experienced to develop products for dentists in Australia and globally so that we can improve dentistry together."

The American Eagle M5 Restorative Series are now being launched globally and are available in Australia through Dentavision.