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."

Comments

Re:New real teeth? No thanks!

[Ouroboro]

It is my understanding that most of the differences in tooth health around the world are due to environmental variance. I grew up in a place where there was a lot of fluoride in the water, and the schools also had programs to provide additional fluoride. This has given me very hard tooth enamel. In the 30+ years of my life, I've only ever had one cavity filled. One would presume that they would grow the teeth in an environment that fosters teeth that are healthy.

Re:My eight year old self would be pleased

[beckerie]

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.

Prevention is better than a cure any day.

This is going to be huge

[Richthofen80]

not the teeth part, but the technology itself.

but the teeth market won't be the market that fuels this research. No, the market is the hair loss market. the same stem cell technology is being used to replace teeth can replace hair follicles.

in traditional hair restoration, hair is transplanted from point A on the bottom of the scalp, where the follicles for some reason don't fall out like they do on the crown. this works, but the hair has to be spread thin, because there's only X amount you can take, and it means there's going to be missing hair from the bottom.

what the cloned hair would do is allow an arbitrary thickness and density of placement, not limited by the donors thickness and supply at the base, since you can take a small amount from the base, clone them to the amount you want, and make a better graft.

i can't wait, being 24 and nearly bald. fight genetics with science.

Re:This is going to be huge

[Zathrus]

the same stem cell technology is being used to replace teeth can replace hair follicles.

Not necessarily. According to the Guardian piece the stem cells are taken from the patient themselves, but it doesn't say where the stem cells originate. I'm certainly not an expert in the field, but there was a really good episode of the PBS show Innovations on stem cell research recently. It talked about spinal cord repair using nerve stem cells from the nose (yes, you have nerve stem cells in your nose. No, I had no idea either.) and heart muscle repair (post heart attack) using bone marrow stem cells.

Anyway, the deal is that not all stem cells are the same. There are differentiated ones and undifferentiated ones. The differentiated ones cannot be used to grow "any" other kind of cell -- at least, not that we've figured out yet. They have already specialized toward a kind of cell (for instance, nerve cells) and cannot grow other kinds of cells (like blood cells or muscle cells). AFAIK, most of the stem cells we still have after birth are these kind.

The undifferentiated stem cells are pretty much the holy grail. They can (in theory) be coaxed toward creating any kind of cell you want -- blood, muscle, nerve, tooth, hair, etc. Of course, there's the issue of getting them. I think some of the stem cells in the bone marrow are undifferentiated. I'm not aware of any others elsewhere in the body. But, heck, we weren't even aware of stem cells a few decades ago and I'm certainly not a medical researcher, so I could be dead wrong here.

All of that said -- whether or not this could be used for your balding head basically comes down to two things -- 1) are they using undifferentiated cells, 2) can we figure out and replicate the process that causes such stem cells to produce hair cells.

And I very much disagree that the hair replacement market will be a primary funding source -- it's going to be too expensive for some time to come. Surgery, even outpatient surgery, is usually not part of hair replacement, and there's no way to get to stem cells without at least some surgery.

I suspect most of it will come from cardiovascular and cancer research. Stem cell research is already looking extremely positive for heart attack treatment. So far every study done has given back 100% positive results. That's unheard of. And the treatment is relatively cheap to boot.

The cancer research comes in an opposite direction. Do you know what leukemia is? Essentially the stem cells in your bone marrow going haywire. We know that stem cells can regenerate other cells, but we really don't understand how, or why they occasionally malfunction. Which is a danger with using stem cell treatments, at least in theory. But if we can figure out how stem cells actually work then we can make some major steps toward fighting cancer.

Oh, and finally, none of this research is being done with fetal stem cells. It's all being done with the stem cells from the patient themselves. Which is a huge plus as far as rejection goes -- there simply won't be any. The only real advantage of fetal stem cell research is that there's a ton of undifferentiated stem cells in an embryo.

Re:Research on Growing Teeth

[DJ Decay]

I'd go to the dentist with bad teeth, because they were probably looked after by the other dentist. Conversely, the dentist with good teeth was looked after by the "good dentist" with bad teeth.

Not Bloody Likely

[milletre]

IIAD (American working in England, actually), and I don't see this stuff coming into anyone's mouth for many years to come.

The hurdles here are the same as hurdles for growing ANY tissue from stem cells. You don't just turn stem cells loose and tell them to become teeth. There is a hugely complex interaction of intra- and inter-cellular communication that goes on that tells a given cell whether to become part of the pulp, whether to start secreting enamel matrix, becoming an odontoblast, etc. If this were just five years off, we'd only be five years off from growing *hands*, etc.

Even if we could grow *a* tooth, we would have to grow the *right* tooth, especially in the "esthetic zone". How do we make sure that it *looks* like a central incisor with 11mm of enamel showing above the gingiva? How do we make the color right? Do we just grow something that is sort of tooth-like and put a crown on it automatically? Do we grow it in vitro and implant it in a surgical site? Do we grow it in situ? If so, how do we maintain the delicate balance of cellular influences in a mouth where someone ostensibly couldn't even keep their natural teeth in order?

I think that this is waaaaaay off in the distance. Their five year estimate is pie-in-the-sky pulled-out-of-their-ass.

In addition ... yeah, they've grown teeth in rats, but in their intestines, IIRC (intentionally in the intestines, but it's still a far cry from functioning dentition in the mouth).

Re:New real teeth? No thanks!

[Milo Fungus]

Whether or not an individual's teeth fall out has no impact on their offspring.

Wrong. An individual who has no teeth will be at a serious disadvantage to even survive, let alone reproduce, especially if they have teeth that are specialized for a particular diet (like eating tough grass or crushing mollusk shells or something). In other words, it impacts the potential to have offspring. If the tooth loss has a genetic basis, then any offspring that the toothless individual does manage to have will be similarly disadvantaged when they reach reproductive age.. However, there would be comparatively little selection on a gene that caused all of their teeth to fall out the minute they finished reproducing.

Loss of teeth is related to oral hygiene of the individual so it cannot be selected for.

This is pretty unique to humans in western cultures who eat too much refined sugar. Tooth decay like modern humans get is vanishingly rare in nature.

From an evolutionary perspective, nothing is set in stone. ... so are you retaking the course next semester, then?

"Sort of set in stone" refers to phylogenetic inertia. Certain things just don't happen very often in evolution because of the difficulty of redesigning an organism. Why do ostriches have wings? Why do humans have an (apparently) nonfunctional vermiform appendix? Why do vertebrates have two sets of limbs instead of three sets? Why am I feeding a troll?

Maybe you should take a few biology courses yourself, mate.