Search on for Way to Grow New Teeth

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Source: JIM RITTER Health Reporter, Sun Times, www.suntimes.com

It won’t happen anytime soon, but the day may be coming when you go to the dentist to grow a new tooth. More than a dozen research teams in the United States and Europe are experimenting with techniques to grow adult teeth from scratch. Perhaps farthest along is a team headed by researcher Paul Sharpe of Kings College London.

In an e-mail interview, Sharpe said he is seeking funding of $5.2 million to begin testing in humans within three years. The teeth would be “completely normal and identical in every way to existing teeth.”

Growing teeth would be a more natural alternative to dentures, dental implants and bridges.

“People like to have natural materials in their mouths,” said Tom Diekwisch, a dental researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago who is studying tooth regeneration in lab animals. “You would think that a tooth grown with your own tissues would be more compatible than foreign materials.”

Different teams are using different approaches. But the techniques generally involve directing immature stem cells to develop into tooth tissue.

For example, Sharpe plans to take stem cells from a patient, grow them in a laboratory, then implant them in the gum at the site of the missing tooth. The implant would take about two months to grow into a full tooth.

Perhaps the leading U.S. research team is headed by Pamela Yelick of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Her team has used rat stem cells to grow well-formed crowns, with layers of enamel, dentin and pulp. Her team also has grown pig tooth crowns.

Growing whole teeth probably is at least 10 years away. What probably will come before that is repairing teeth by growing tissue. For example, rather than fixing cracked teeth with synthetic materials, dentists would grow new cells to fill the cracks.

“You could seamlessly repair something,” Yelick said. “It would be much stronger.”

It also might be possible to regenerate pulp inside the tooth, thereby eliminating the need for root canals.

The key to growing or regenerating teeth is coaxing stem cells to do the job. A stem cell is an unspecialized cell that can develop into a specialized cell.

Stem cell research is under way on many fronts. For example, researchers hope to coax stem cells to produce insulin for diabetics, regenerate heart muscle for cardiac patients or repair spinal cord injuries for paraplegics.

Some researchers are obtaining stem cells from human embryos, which opponents consider unethical because embryos are destroyed in the process. But the stem cells that would be used to grow or repair teeth would not come from embryos. They instead could be obtained from such sources as the patient’s mouth, jaw, blood or existing teeth. Some researchers prefer to use the term progenitor cells.

Although improved dental care is enabling more people to keep their teeth, tooth loss remains a huge problem. By age 44, nearly seven in 10 American adults have lost at least one tooth to decay or gum disease. And about one in four elderly adults have lost all of their teeth.

It costs anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 to replace a lost tooth with an implant or a bridge. Sharpe believes it might be cheaper to grow teeth.

“There is an economy of scale,” he said. “It is not much more expensive for us to make 10 teeth or one.”

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16 Responses to “ Search on for Way to Grow New Teeth ”

• Anonymous December 28th, 2005

  
  

  hurry up! this is too good to be true!

• Anonymous January 3rd, 2006

  
  

  Forget teeth. Can you see growing a new jawbone, to replace bone surgically removed in an oral cancer situation?

• Anonymous January 4th, 2006

  
  

  take it easy! it will come next! small steps need to go far!

• Anonymous January 10th, 2006

  
  

  please let this happen soon. As good as dental implants might be, they are not ‘the holy grail’. Imagine, associated bone and gums growing around the tooth….how brilliant is that?

• Anonymous January 19th, 2006

  
  

  hurry hurry and i am willing to be a test case for the growing of new teeth if you need a human please call me

• Sheila January 24th, 2006

  
  

  How long brfore we will see this growing of teeth Other articles made it sound like it is not far away

• Anonymous February 10th, 2006

  
  

  It will be very interesting how the stem cells will be able to create different tipes of teeth:incisors,canines,premolars and etc.

• George February 23rd, 2006

  
  

  I hope this research actually works as DNA can be very complicated!

• Deepika Avanti February 28th, 2006

  
  

  I’d like to be part of testing new teeth growing and new gum tissue with stem cells. Please call me at 303 440-4431

• Dr. George Papadopoulos March 15th, 2006

  
  

  I would like to take part in the tests on human beings. Please let me know in the e mail address above.

• rohan March 16th, 2006

  
  

  please hurry up on this research, since many people like me are waiting for this research to be succesful

• scott.k.k April 3rd, 2006

  
  

  I would like to be a part of being tested for growing new teeth

• Thom June 3rd, 2006

  
  

  I have 20 teeth damaged and I would like to pay and/or participate in this trial. Again, I am willing to pay for the treatment….20 x $3000= $60,000 for starters

• Asian Guy June 8th, 2006

  
  

  I’ll be a test subject, 18 male usa, asian-american.

• karen July 27th, 2006

  
  

  I’d like to be a test subject. Thanks to a quack of a dentist. Who thought it was easier to pull them all them all rather than fix them. He ruined my life!!!!

• Luis Baralt April 15th, 2008

  
  

  Though I’m 80 I’ve always had exceptionally good teet. I’ve ljust ‘dropped’ four of them in last couple of years, from mere girth abrassion; that is to say, the roots are still healthy and unextracted and give me no trouble. Is it possible to grow new teeth from those roots according to reported newly developed techniques? Am asking for no implants, involving root canal and such…

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