Scientists Grow Living "Replacement Teeth" for Dental Implants
Like something out of "Repo! The Genetic Opera," scientists have managed to grow human-like teeth in a lab — and implant them inside a miniature pig's mouth, in a harbinger of weird new frontiers for dentistry.
As the MIT Technology Review explains, researchers at Tufts bioengineered this fascinating monstrosity using a mix of bovine and human tooth cells that were grown inside bits of pig teeth.
The idea behind this terrifying lab-made concoction, which was detailed in a December paper published in the journal Stem Cells Transitional Medicine, is to create replacement teeth for human patients.
Lead investigator Pamela Yelick — who runs an eponymous tissue bioengineering lab at Tufts — and her postdoctoral fellow Weibo Zhang have for years been looking for ways to create dental implants that fit peoples' mouths perfectly.
"It's very difficult to replace an implant, because first you have to rebuild all the bone that has been absorbed over time that's gone away," the bioengineering expert told Tech Review. "We're working on trying to create functional replacement teeth."
Throughout her lengthy quest to grow better chompers, Yelick has used cells from pig jaws because the farm animals grow many sets of teeth throughout their lifetimes. To this end, the scientist has long salvaged pig jaws from slaughterhouses and gotten the cells from there — making this entire project all the more gruesome, if thrifty.
During a particularly sinister-sounding prior iteration of the experiment, the professor grew pig-human hybrid teeth on biodegradable scaffolds that were then implanted into the abdomens of rats because, as Tech Review notes, the rodents' jaws were too small for the array of teeth.
"It doesn't bother the rats," Yelick told the magazine.
While that freaky experiment clearly paved the way for this latest development, the researchers said that they didn't get to the human-like structure discovered in the latest iteration until they built scaffolds from bits of bovine teeth and implanted the semi-finished product inside the jaws of mini-pigs.
After two months, the lab-grown teeth were subsequently removed — sorry to those pigs — and Yelick was impressed upon discovering that they were very "toothlike." The new structures had even begun growing hard layers of dentin and cementum, which occurs in adult human teeth.
An obvious perfectionist, Yelick admitted that she and Zhang have not yet created "beautifully formed teeth yet" — but that's just spurring her to keep going.
'We're optimistic that one day we will be able to create a functional biological tooth substitute that can get into people who need tooth replacement," the scientist told Tech Review.
More on teeth: Scientists About to Test Medicine to Grow New Teeth
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