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Canadian Scientists Regrow Teeth
54mc writes "APL reports that Canadian Scientists have created the first device able to regrow teeth and bones.
The researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton filed patents earlier this month in the United States for the tool based on low-intensity pulsed ultrasound technology after testing it on a dozen dental patients in Canada."
I didn't believe in the tooth fairy until I saw my dentist in loafers.
So if you are out there, Mr. Dentist man, you can now officially BITE ME!
This was a 2 phase discovery:
:)
Phase 1 - Invent a sport where a piece of equipment that, at times, travels towards your face at 160 km/hour and weighs only 170 grams.
Phase 2 - Invent a way to grow teeth back due to resulting injury from Phase 1
It's a Canadian make-work program
- - - "Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers."
"with low frequency ultrasound pulses" is pretty uninformative for me. If they can regrow theeth, do they first have to implant a 'seed' that will focus the growth? Every theeth has a quite specific form, how will this device influence that?
Or can it be that somebody patented a possible way to stimulate bone & tooth growth and some reporter let his fantasy run wild on it?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
This notice hereby notifies you, Tooth Fairy that you are hereby no longer needed as your job has been outsourced to Canada. We hope you will find our severance package of 6 months teeth as well as full dental to be more than generous. Also note that you are hereby banned from acting in the capacity of ortho-collector for a period of 8 years, and any attmpt to circumvent this will lead to a termination of the aforementioned benefits.
-The Management
Lord know Canada is a great place to research tooth replacement, considering that Maine is so close by! We could really use some of that stuff down here!
Gramps is getting sick of eating through a straw.
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
.. test this on other body parts. Just sayin.
here
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
"Canadian Scientists Regrow Teeth"
A group of Canadian scientists in the age from 4 to 10 has successfully regrown their teeth after they mysteriously lost them.
Thee ma ?
I thold you bruthing your theeth wath fo thuckerth !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
> Chen helped create the tiny ultrasound machine that gently massages gums and stimulates tooth growth from the root once inserted into a person's mouth, mounted on braces or a removable plastic crown.
As several of my teeth have gone the way of the fairy, I wonder how this "treatment" copes with teeth that have been root canal filled.
And what colour does the new tooth grow back at? It it's pure white - fantastic as it'll put lots of whiting products out of business, but bad as it'll have the pringles effect; once you start you'll have to have all your front/visible teeth done, even if they are just discoloured.
What with all those hockey players losing teeth. It was either there or Kentucky where people also don't have teeth. Interestingly that's where the toothbrush was invented. Otherwise it would have been called the teethbrush.
Thanks, I'll be here all week, enjoy the veal.
(Disclaimer: I am a Kentuckian)
From TFA:
But they had something like this working in the late 1990s so for part of the last seven years they have been mucking around making a minature version of their machine. A proper engineering job would have taken six months, max, and they could have kept working on the science.
Sorry to bitch about this but I see too much improvisation going on and not enough forethought.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
until they prove it on these (currently) toothless specimens:
1. The Justice dept. (SCO vs IBM)
2. The anti-trust dept. (MS vs US)
3. Other suggestions welcome...
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I'm far away to know something about odontology, so i ask to the slashdot doctors:
This stimulation process could be used to cure bone illness, like Osteoporosis or Osteosarcoma ??
Thanks in advance.
Rock and Roll
I don't need no stinkin' "real" teeth. My false teeth are just fine, thank you very much! Hell, I can even eat corn on the cob, if someone cuts it off the cob and then mashes it up into a fine paste!
We can grow teeth now. Next step, growing teeth in places not the mouth.
Now all those nightmares I have about a woman with teeth in her vagina are going to come true.
Thanks a lot Canada!!
Fantastic rant. It's logically inconsistent, substitutes opinions for facts, uses examples that don't illustrate your point, and sets up strawmen as its main thrust. Absolutely Slashdottian.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Horse hockey on the "growing a new tooth" thing, but I can see repairing damaged teeth, depending on the cause of the damage. You need the presence of odontoblasts, etc in order for a new tooth to grow. That guy Chen is an engineer, not a dentist. I'm thinking he doesn't really understand how teeth form and grow, so he's got high hopes for his invention. The root structure of teeth is covered in cementum and dentin, which are repairable, so it makes sense that teeth with root resorption may be fixed by the ultrasonic thing. But to completely grow new teeth, you'd have to have "tooth stem cells" in the area, and those stem cells would have to know what size and shape of tooth to form for that area. I don't see that one happening. I also don't see damaged enamel being fixed by this thing; once enamel is gone, it's pretty much gone.
Thweet!
There needs to be a root. Interesting that you bring up the research into teeth grown from stem cells[1], possibly one could create the root from stem cells, implant, and then finish the growth with this device. I'm not sure if tissue rejection would be a problem, though.
There's also a good potential for this to be used for body modification. Easy enough to add things to the diet to impart a color into the tooth while it grows (one reason why kids aren't given tetracycline -- it makes their growing teeth permanaently orange). A mouthful of glow-in-the-dark teeth? No problem. How about teeth that glow orange or green under a blacklight, instead of violet?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What's next? All I can say is WOW, I've lost s few teeth from gum disease.
It isn't nearly as impressive as the technological miracle I've experienced the last 2 days.
I wore glasses since age 7 (yes I'm a nerd). I switched to contacts 4 years ago, and had to have reading glasses as well as contacts. I used to be four-eyes, now that I'm old it's six eyes.
Then I got a cataract in my left eye. The specialist told me of a new implant that was only approved in 2003, and extra $1900 above what insurance pays. As it's a one shot deal (they can't remove an implanted artificial lens) I went temporarily broke on it.
Dr. McCoy would have been jealous of all the technology in the operating room.
In the recovery room I could read the clock on the wall without any external corrective lenses for the first time in memory (I've worn glasses since 1959). The next day (yesterday) the eye doctor tested my eye, 20-20. For the first time in my life I have no restrictions on my driver's license!
Last week I had the type on the browser enlarged, plus wore reading glasses. Today I have the type set for normal, and no reading glasses. They tell me in a month I'll be able to read six point type w/o reading glasses!
In Star Trek II, McCoy gives Kirk a pair of antique reading glasses because he's allergic to the drug that cures age related nearsightedness.
We're still 200 years from the 23rd century, but we've passed Star Trek tech. Even McCoy didn't have these implants at his disposal! The implant I got, called a Crystal Lens, cures nearsightedness, farsightedness (both age-related and youth myopia), cataracts, and even astigmatism!
I'll get the other eye done in a few years. Then maybe I'll get some Canadian teeth!
(anti-MRC="botched". Couldn't be more wrong!)
I've complained before and will again, that dentistry has been the most underwhelming of 'sciences' for the past 100 years. What advances have we seen since the use of anaesthetics to reduce the pain? We got ultra-violet whitening systems.... and veneers.
So finally there's some progress. First was the company in florida which has since sort of gone into hiding... they showed a solution of genetically engineered oral bacteria that would take over control of the mouth by out-competing the native breed.. but were engineered to not create cavities. Haven't heard much on that front recently though. Maybe they got bought up by the makers of Crest or something...
Now we have a device that can regrow eroded tooth material... well it's something at least.
Maybe I can stop thinking of the whole practice of drilling and gouging and filling in with metals as the most barbaric so-called treatments of any human health problem. Dentistry is still at the equivalent stage of just cutting off the leg when it's broken, rather than fixing it. Hopefully that is about to change.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I'm curious... when you folks read an article like this, do you automatically believe it?
Personally, when I see "filed for a patent earlier this month", "testing it on a dozen patients", and "commercialization in two years" -- coupled with a science-fiction-like technology -- I think "BULLSHIT".
Just add it to the list of other bullshit vaporware impractical/impossible inventions that show up every once in a while trying to grab funding/sucker dollars: holographic memory, ridiculous compression technologies, flying cars, perpetual motion machines, etc.
I find it pretty amazing that almost all of the responses in this thread just assume that these guys are telling the truth about their "discovery". I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love to see a new miraculous bone and tooth growing technology be discovered... but scientific and religious claims are easy to make. It's easy to put out a press release. It's hard to prove miraculous things. It's hard to provide evidence for the seemingly-unbelievable.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Innovative and creative approach, and it looks promising. Looks like this one has teeth.
crickets.chirp()
The American Dental Association has called upon the Canadian Government to put an end to the regrowth of teeth, claiming that the availability of cheap teeth from Canada makes American dentists less interested in improving their techniques.
Said an A.D.A. spokesperson, "We need prices to remain high so that we can afford to innovate. When people can just get new teeth cheaply by just crossing the border, our strangle-ho.... uh, revenue stream will be jeopardized. The U.S. government must act immediately!"
For the engineers in the room...
http://www.ece.ualberta.ca/~jchen/
Article from the Globe & Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.2 0060628.TEETH28/TPStory/National
Can the device be controlled via BlueTooth?
A few years ago, I broke both bones in my forearm -- the radius was broken so badly that I had pulverized a small portion of it so the two parts didn't line up exactly. They didn't notice this in the x-rays (and so couldn't cut into my hip as they hadn't gotten my authorization for that), so they tried artifical (read: cadaver) bone to regrow the spot. Didn't work.
A few months later, they enrolled me in a trial of a similar sort of ultrasonic technology by which my bone should regrow. They had been getting a 94% success rate with fibias, but the arm was something new. Needless to say, I was one of those lucky minorities that didn't show any growth. Months later, I was back on the table with new bone being brought in from my hip. Six weeks after that, I was healed. While cool, there is certainly no replacement for real bone.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Sure, Lazarus Long mentions rebudding teeth as a part of a long list of antigeria techniques used at the Howard Clinics in "Time Enough For Love".
But even he would say it was an obvious step. We've been needing this for as long as there've been people... BUT KUDOS for you, sir, for remembering science fiction didn't start on television and movies. Or anime.
There's treasure in the golden age of science fiction. A lot more imagination than displayed in current "sci-fi", which is to science fiction as Hostess cupcakes are to food. Thinking about it, the readers of golden-age SF went on to build moonships. Current sci-fi readers have a hard time thinking about driving electric cars. Difference of breadth of imagination.
How about the fact that published papers have shown, since at least 1996, that ultrasound can accelerate bone growth.
If it can accelerate bone growth, it seems a logical enough step for someone to experiement with teeth, and given that it's been ten years since bone growth was seen, why is teeth/jaw regeneration so hard to believe?
Or is it just because you haven't heard of it, it can't be real?
Did you also know that light acts simultaneously as both a particle and a wave, depending on how you examine it?
GPL Deconstructed