For the more than 7 per cent of people over the age of 20 who don’t have any of their own teeth, the only option is artificial substitutes. But an era of regrowing living teeth may now be almost upon us
Many of us will lose an adult tooth in our lifetimes, whether through disease or misadventure – a punch that landed, a skateboarding trick that didn’t, say. And if you join their ranks, which include the nearly 178 million adults in the US who have lost at least one tooth, your options are pretty much the same as they have been for millennia: artificial replacement., but not much. The metal implants we use today tend to fail over time, causing significant pain when they do.
Wooden dentures from early 20th century Japan. For thousands of years, the only way to deal with lost teeth has been to replace them.A living tooth, however, would last longer and be stronger. It would feel like the real thing, complete with nerve endings, and would be less likely to cause infection or be rejected. “The ultimate goal,” says Sharpe, “is to replace a lost tooth with a biological tooth that’s completely normal.
That was in 2002. She and her colleagues have been improving their process ever since. In their most recent paper,, also at Tufts University, used an improved scaffold: tooth buds from pigs, stripped of all their cells. They then seeded these with a mix of dental cells – some from humans and some from pigs – and introduced the resulting bioengineered structures into the mouths of pigs.
When dental epithelial cells and dental mesenchymal cells combine to form a tooth, they do so by sending a complicated series of chemical signals back and forth among themselves. For this to work, at least one of the cell types needs to be an embryonic cell – only they send the right signals to start the process. “That is a big, big stumbling block,” says Sharpe.
The reality is that, after more than 20 years of research, neither method of tooth regrowth has been used in a human clinical trial, much less a dentist’s chair. This is partly because dentistry is relatively underfunded, especially compared with other areas of medicine like cancer or heart disease. “You can live without your teeth, but you can’t live without a heart or a brain,” says Yelick.in Vancouver started trying to regrow teeth cells and structures 20 years ago.
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