Regrowing your own teeth may be possible within a decade


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SALT LAKE CITY — Using stem cells to regenerate body parts is no longer science fiction and may hold true inside our mouths.

The new dean of the University of Utah's School of Dentistry projects regrowing our own teeth could become a reality within the decade.

According to Dr. Rena D'Souza who now assumes her new role as the school's dean, "There are stem cells that lie in our adult teeth and our baby teeth, which we lose, that can be used to regenerate or regrow structures of the tooth that are lost to decay or trauma."

D'Souza sees an expanding program at the U for teaching, training and research. She believes dental research should be a collaborative effort. The university, she said, has already established a national environment for scientific collaboration where researchers from multiple disciplines work together to discover and polish new technologies.

Research on oral stem cell therapy is underway in many parts of the world. In fact, D'Souza's colleagues in China, Japan and Korea are already growing teeth in mice and rats.

"Those stem cells are not embryonic stem cells, "D'Souza said. "They are stem cells that reside in a niche within the tooth cavity that you can actually retrieve."


Those stem cells are not embryonic stem cells. They are stem cells that reside in a niche within the tooth cavity.

–Dr. Rena D'Souza


Regrowing teeth would be far cry from current techniques for replacing teeth.

In KSL's visit to the university's dental clinic, we watched as Ben Sant stepped aside from his job as a dental assistant to become a patient.

He was getting a synthetic implant that will replace the real tooth he lost in a bicycle accident many years ago. University of Utah resident dentist Dan Mirci performed the surgery.

As he described from an x-ray picture of Sant's jaw, "we use a titanium screw that we'll screw into the bone and the bone actually osteo-integrates and fuses to the implant."

Months later, after the implant has healed, Mirci or his colleagues will place a finished crown over the implant peg.

This technology has been around a long time and it's one of several artificial options people currently use to replace missing teeth. But what would it have been like had Sant been able to simply regrow his tooth? Imagine no tooth implants, no false teeth, but real teeth regenerated from the body's own stem cells.

"It would have been great, not to go 13 years without a tooth and to just be able to grow my own this whole time," Sant said.

Salivary diagnostics
D'Souza also foresees progress in what is called salivary diagnostics.

Human saliva, she said, is a monitor of what's going on in other parts of the body. Its chemistry can follow the success or failure of various treatments and predict genes that may predispose us to diseases.

Read more about it here.

While it won't happen for this young dental assistant, stem cell therapy will become a reality for others. Developing technologies to regrow teeth in humans remains a challenge, but D'Souza believes it will happen and success may not be that far down the road.

"What I consider targeted therapies like that could be five to 10 years away," she said.

Teaching students in the top of their class to become dentists with a community focus, training them in the latest technologies, learning how to individualize and tailor make therapies for patients, expanding outreach programs and collaborative research with others on campus -- all these and more are goals for this new dean.

Come next year in Research Park, the School of Dentistry will have a new building with more than 75,000 square feet of combined clinical and research space. As D'Souza said, "it is well poised to be in the top tier of dental schools in the country."

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Ed Yeates

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