Slashdot Mirror
Growing Teeth with Stem Cell Technology
davidoff404 writes "Lost a tooth lately? Well, a natural cure may be at hand. The BBC is reporting on a grant awarded to researchers at King's College, London, which they say will allow them to develop a technique for growing natural replacement teeth. Using recently developed techniques, stem cells can be programmed to develop into teeth, and then inserted into the gap in a patient's jaw. According to the BBC, the research has already been successfully performed on mice, and clinical trials on humans should begin within two years."
teeth aren't made of the same stuff as hair and nails. teeth are bones, and all bones have blood vessels and nerves in them... unless you want flexible teeth of course...
Since you have root canales than you know that the tooth "dies" when you remove the blood vessels. The tooth is a healthy living organ requiring nutrients. You can remove this but than the tooth starts turning black from the lack of nutrients (any real dentist please step in and fill the voids of knowledge). The nerves are there to let you know when something is wrong. Yeah I wish my legs didn't have nerves when I brook it but I need to know that something was wrong.
The article I read said the stem cells were taken from the patient... I doubt that they're planning on replacing teeth in unborn foetuses.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Bush never banned stem cells. He simply limited the ways they could be gotten. And then somebody figured out how to derive them and made the entire arguement null and void, so life in the US Stem Cell research industry went on, life as normal.
Correction: teeth are made of enamel, not bone. Enamel is much harder than bone (and in fact living bone tissue is rather flexible IIRC). Teeth have to made of harder stuff than bone in order to grind up some of the different types of foods that omnivores like humans eat.
The tooth is a healthy living organ requiring nutrients. You can remove this but than the tooth starts turning black
A more signficant issue is that a dead tooth (ie, post root canal) tends to become brittle over time, and much more likely to suddenly break when stressed.
How do the stem cells know when to *stop* growing the tooth?
Via the excact same mechanism they do in every human being already, maybe?
Oh, and human tissue that grows out of control doesn't become huge and monstrous. It becomes cancer, and kills its own flesh & blood.
I have lived 28 out of 29 years in New York (and one in California). I can tell you that it has nothing to do with environment and everything to do with genetics.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
It's worrying to think that this development might lead to people becoming complacent about their oral hygiene. Just as the pill doesn't prevent people from contracting STD's, the ability to grow teeth through stem cell technology shouldn't send the message to the general public that it's OK to cut corners with personal health.
... the rest of us will continue to excersize good habits, and have even better dental health available to us than beforehand...complete with new teeth when our old ones fail simply as a result of age, get cracked, or otherwise damaged with time and use.
Exactly right. Jokes about no longer flossing aside, if you lose your gums to gum disease, it won't matter how many shiny new teeth you can grow. Without gums they'll be worse than useless, they'll be a liability, complete with nerves to exact an excruciating lesson as to why.
That having been said, its an excellent addition to our medical/dental toolkit, and one I welcome. Stupid people will use it as an excuse to let their hygene go to hell
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Humans already have a first and second dentition, why not simply encourage a third with hormones or something? You'd have baby teeth, teenage teeth, and over-the-hill teeth. When your third set started coming in, it would officially be time to go buy that Corvette and get a blonde bimbo for the passenger seat.
On the subject of teeth: Dental care is good enough lately that people don't lose enough teeth to make room in the jaw for the rear molars, the "wisdom" teeth that come in later. It seems obvious to me, that we could tell in the early teens whether an individual's wisdom teeth will be in the way, and then simply prevent their growth with a squirt of botox. It would eliminate their costly and painful removal later.
I'm not saying most people are in favor of embryonic stem cell research, I just haven't seen any public polls on it to show me otherwise.
Nope, Vagina dentata are real, although exremely rare (scroll down).
The previous sig has been removed due to
start with diet: you need calcium. and not a lot of processed sugar.
good habits: brushing regularly. flossing. and not eating all the time (without brushing afterward).
there are medicines that you can take while you are growing up that will impact the development of your teeth.
diet and medicines that your mother was into before you were born.
there's a lot that goes into healthy teeth and some of this was really quite recent.
eric
Bush limited fetal stem cell lines eligible for US federally funded research to those available at the time the decision was made. Since then, most of those lines have been found to be so contaminated as to be useless. US researchers were and are crippled by this decision. If you claim that someone has found a way to create clean, pluripotent stem cell lines that do everything new fetal stem cells can do, please provide a citation -- I follow this issue closely and haven't heard about it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
because there is an issue with decay where the crown meets the enamal on the outside.
and the tooth probably failed because it died (or is dying) which means that the whole tooth is at risk.
eric
It also answers the first question that came to my mind -- how does a molar or incisor get specified? Apparently, the different teeth form in the same dish and are then identified and sorted before transplantation. And the stem cells come from the patient, not from fetuses, BTW.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Correction to correction: Teeth are not made up of enamel the crown of the tooth is covered with enamel. Check it out here... http://kidshealth.org/kid/body/teeth_noSW.html
Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.
No, this procedure is performed using adult stem cells. Bush is only opposed to the use of embryonic stem cells in research.
Was the parent post serious, or have I been trolled?
I'd look for a dentist in another town.
Your riddle was originally intended as a question of barbers, one with terrible hair and one with well-styled hair. It does not translate as well to dentistry, as dental hygene requires personal effort in addition to regular dentist visits. True, hairstyles also require some personal effort, but at least most people don't cut their own hair, so a barber with badly shorn hair would indicate that his barber is a lousy cut.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Not flossing is just gross, even more gross than not brushing your teeth. Floss for the first time in a week and you'll find so much rancid crap in between your teeth, no matter how much you brushed. I've got one filling in my 21 years and that's in between two of my back molars. Perhaps if I had been more religious about flossing all along I wouldn't have needed it...but believe me now I floss between every tooth twice a day and rinse with antiseptic. Once you've gone through a filling (with a freshman dental student no less) and paid for it out of your own pocket, believe me flossing is not a hassle.
I've researched having implants done, it's quite expensive, and also destructive to your mouth, the process requires filing/drilling of the bone in your mouth in order to insert titanium seats that will then be built-on and capped with false teeth. As someone who's been to the dentist a lot, this prospect is not the most desirable.
BUT, Since I've heard of the work being done with stem-cells, I've always wondered why they've not tried teeth! What's inspiring about this process is:
- It's your OWN stem cells. Your Source-Code. No rejection.
- It's 100% natural, The teeth will continue to behave like real teeth and will wear and change shape along with the rest in your mouth.
- No more fooling with gooey-glop to keep your teeth in.
- No longer afraid to smile "too big" for fear someone might notice that the some of the teeth in your grill don't quite match.
- No fear of flying teeth when you laugh.
- Not having to pull out your teeth when you through the metaldetector at the airport. (they got these metal wires in there)
- Not having to excuse yourself from a restaraunt dinner table because some piece of herb is stuck between the roof of your mouth and your partial.
- being able to taste the full-range of food flavors.
- No more headaches (literally) caused by ill-fitting mouth-gear.
I would gladly volunteer for this. The promise of positive results is just too great.I wondered whether I should elaborate, but the original post was getting a bit long. I guess brushing would be considered an adaptaion, but not in the strict evolutioanry sense (yes, I realize you were joking :).
I was thinking of rodents. Beavers are a good example. Their front incisors have indeterminate growth because they are not rooted. They just keep growing out of their gums for their whole lives, while the beavers keep wearing them down by chewing on wood all of the time. This is a common strategy for mammals that do lots of tooth-eroding activities. There is another rodent that has rootless molars that they use for chewing up some really tough grass (I forget the name of the species at the moment).
Elephants use a different strategy. They delay development of their molars and emerge them one at a time from their gum as the previously-emerged molar wears out. They have the exact same number of molars as any other mammal, but this strategy gives them a "new" pair every so often. Old elephants die of starvation when they wear out their last pair of molars.
Horses have absurdly long teeth that grind down very slowly throughout their lives. Horses have such tall cheeks because their upper and lower jaws are full of these long teeth.
That's what I had in mind. And brushing too, I guess. This article would be another example of an adaptation to get around the limitations of two sets of teeth.
Amoung dentists, we do consider dentin is a living tissue (or at least, most dentists I know would consider it living). It has microscopic tubules inside in which there are cells or extensions of cells that are in the pulp. If you cut into it (eg. when doing a filling), pain will be percieved. People with recession and exposed root surfaces often temperature sensitivity since the dentin is exposed.
Does dentin require any nutrition? That is a bit of a point of debate still. When a root canal is done, the pulp tissue is removed, and the tooth is essentially dead. Normally, the pressure from inside the pulp causes slow fluid flow through those tubules to the outside. I'm not sure if anybody has determined exactly what that does (perhaps some sort of defensive flushing mechanism has been speculated). I don't know of any studies that have been done about teeth with root canal treatment (and hence lacking this fluid flow) being more vulnerable to anything either.
Teeth which have had root canals do dry out though, and thus the dentin does become slightly more brittle (and hence prone to fracture). More so, the access opening that has to be made to do the root canal weakens the tooth structurally (think of a cylinder with closed ends, and then you put a hole through one end into the hollow center)... hence again root canal teeth being more fragile. And as mentioned, the root canal is often done because of prexisting factors such as large amount of decay or trauma. Therefore, a crown is often highly recommended to reinforce what is left. Much better than having the tooth fracture straight down the root (which I have seen quite often with uncrowned root canaled teeth) and then having to be pulled because you can't fix it.
As to the tooth turning black, that often is a result of the oxidation of the materials that are used to seal the canal up after root canal treatment is performed.
And this technique of growing a new tooth? I hope people are very patient, since the process to grow a new tooth will probably take years (at least, that's how long it takes for you body to form one when you are young).
-- Silhouette