A YOUNG York mum suddenly bristled with ideas when her teething infant daughter refused to have her new lone tooth brushed.

Rowena Mead, 23, grew frustrated when little Saskia, then a year old, stubbornly refused to allow the brush end of her child's toothbrush into her mouth, preferring instead to gnaw the rubber end.

And suddenly - ping! - Rowena came up with her idea: A fun, bendy toothbrush with 360 degree bristles throughout the length of the stem.

Now she has patented TheCaterpillarBrush along with its trademark. Engineering departments at a number of universities in Yorkshire are competing to make the prototype. She is starting clinical trials to win the approval of the British Dental Health Council. And her marketing has begun in earnest.

This weekend she wowed parents at Creepy Crawlies play centre, at Clifton Moor, York, by showing them her designs at a stand and monitoring their reaction in a questionnaire.

Rowena, who switched from being a trained physiotherapist to becoming a copywriter with her own freelance business, called SubservientCopy, says: "The response was terrific.

"The two directors of Creepy Crawlies are very keen to help generate public awareness of my product and the importance of teeth cleaning in general.

"Figures for the UK this year show that 46 per cent of children between five and six years have tooth decay. So, apparently, every other child in the world has a cavity. It's really quite shocking."

Her goal is to help children and teething babies clean their teeth more effectively than the standard children's toothbrushes.

"Companies are trying all sorts of gimmicks - the latest being 'tooth tunes' - but no one has yet tried to simply put more bristles on the brush. Nothing like it has ever been on the market before. I hope soon to change that."

Having worked for Stone Soup, in York, and helping to produce the guide for Venturefest Yorkshire 2007 Rowena gained a good understanding of what it meant to become an entrepreneur.

At the Venturefest gathering at York Racecourse, she met Steve Anscough, owner of Smart Innovation, who helped her then directed her to Knowledge Rich, a firm which contacted all the engineering departments of regional universities to pitch for the process of making a prototype from the design.

Rowena said: "It will cost a bit of money but I have a small nest egg given to me by my mother when she sold her house to live in Spain.

"That will also help to fund clinical trials in order to get the support of the British Dental Health Council."

From there, she plans to seek the advice of Business Link North Yorkshire on how to get TheCaterpillarBrush on to the market.

Ideally she would like to see it on sale within a year. Now aged 20 months, little Saskia has 11 teeth.

"She has nine to go, so there's time yet!" says Rowena.