Lantern Bioworks has created a genetically engineered Streptococcus mutans strain BCS3-L1 to be used as a long-term treatment for dental cavaties caused by secretion of lactic acid from the natural S. mutans. Assuming that it works and persists in people's mouths, I'm wondering what's stopping anyone else from culturing the strain from a mouth that has been succesfully treated?

The difficult part of the process appears to be creating the modified strain of S. mutans as described in the gene modification steps here https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/18ZDSe92LgLmS0sUbosvNxByii_1kjnEj. Following that document it seems that they are planning on applying it to a small number of initial volunteers. Once the strain is "in the wild", what's stopping anyone from creating a culture of BCS3-L1?

From my non-biologist estimation, the culturing steps could be completed in a cheap home lab with relative ease. The process is described here under "Preparing Culture": https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m2SEWL_rrlQLEi1OiD9K5XbO_7RQ8iMX/edit.

For the scope of this question I'm not really interested in someone getting their hands on the viable culture in a dish or tube and expanding it. Specifically it would have to be sourced from someone's mouth who was treated.

If someone claims to have succesfully cultured BCS3-L1 there are some reasons that this market may resolve N/A including:

• verifying the source of the culture is from someone's mouth

• analytical verifcation that the cultured strain is actually a copy of the BCS3-L1 strain

I'm open to improving the verifiability of this question so please leave a comment if you have any ideas.