Scientists from King’s College London have managed to grow a tooth under laboratory conditions, a breakthrough they describe as filling in crucial gaps in research.
Director of regenerative dentistry Dr Ana Angelova-Volponi said that “by growing a tooth in a dish, we are really filling in the gaps of knowledge”.
In a quest for the perfect smile, many people turn to braces or implants, but the latter can cause unforeseen problems for the patient, as well as the dentists looking after them, reports the BBC.
“Implants require invasive surgery and a good combination of implants and alveolar bone,” said Xuechen Zhang, a final-year PhD student at the Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences.
“Lab-grown teeth would naturally regenerate, integrating into the jaw as real teeth. They would be stronger, longer lasting, and free from rejection risks, offering a more durable and biologically compatible solution than fillings or implants.”
The King’s team, in collaboration with Imperial College London, has successfully introduced a special type of material that enables cells to communicate between each other.
This means one cell can effectively tell another to start becoming a tooth cell, which mimics the environment of growing teeth and allows scientists to recreate the process of tooth development in the lab.
Having successfully created the environment needed to grow teeth, however, the scientists now need to work out how to get them from the lab to a patient’s mouth.
And that could take many more years.
“We have different ideas to put the teeth inside the mouth. We could transplant the young tooth cells at the location of the missing tooth and let them grow inside the mouth,” said Zhang.
“Alternatively, we could create the whole tooth in the lab before placing it in the patient’s mouth.”
But whatever method they choose, the initial process starts in the laboratory.
More than half of all older adults living in care homes have tooth decay, compared with 40% of over -75s who do not live in care homes, according to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence and the Social Care Institute for Excellence.
BBC article – Lab-grown teeth to ‘fill in the gaps’ in regenerative dentistry (Open access)
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