Stem cells were once the sexiest of all scientific frontiers, promising to cure all disease and pretty much save the world. Now it’s entering the area of the banal: replacement teeth (soon, we’ll hear of stem cells for baldness or longer nails and it’ll all be over). This story from MIT’s Technology Review has the details:
Sharpe’s lab is looking for adult stem cells, including those found in bone marrow and dental gum, as possible candidates for regrowing teeth. So far, he and his colleagues have had success with bone-marrow stem cells, forming teeth and transplanting them into mouse cavities. However, Sharpe says that obtaining such cells from human bone marrow is a painful process. In the next three years, he hopes to identify more-accessible stem cells that may be able to form not only teeth, but also–and more important–roots.
Our clinical experience with toothlessness suggests those most in need of dental stem cell therapy are the least able to afford it. The tattoo-to-teeth ratio is an increasingly well-studied prognostic factor…
More from Prof. Paul Sharpe’s teeth research, and his company Odontis…
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