Losing a tooth as an adult can mean facing a complex path, often limited to solutions such as titanium dental implants or plastic dentures. But what if there was an alternative? Science is exploring the possibility of creating bioengineered dental implants: human teeth grown in the laboratory that could replace damaged ones. A team of researchers is experimenting with an innovative technique that combines pig and human cells to create a dental implant indistinguishable from a human tooth: does this open up new prospects for the future of dentistry? Let's see together.
Current Alternatives to Dental Implants
A healthy tooth is made up of dental pulp inside, containing nerves and blood vessels, surrounded by layers of hard tissue called dentin, cementum, and enamel. enamel It is the hardest tissue in the body, but it can be eaten away by bacteria, causing tooth decay. If the decay reaches the pulp, it can be very painful (come on, you all know that). Dentists can remove decayed areas and replace them with fillings, which last about 15 years. However, fillings need to be replaced periodically, and each time more of the tooth is removed.
“Eventually… it’s almost inevitable that the person will lose that tooth,” he says. Christian Miranda French, researcher at the Oregon Health & Science University
Today, as mentioned, those who lose a tooth can opt for a dental implant. A titanium screw anchored to the jawbone, topped with a porcelain crown. They look like real teeth and can be used for chewing, but they are not the same thing.
The Risks of Traditional Dental Implants
If the dental implant is not perfectly aligned with the other teeth, chewing can transmit uneven forces to the surrounding jawbone, damaging it, explains Pamela Yelick, researcher at the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine of Boston. In addition, bacteria can adhere to dental implants, causing infections such as peri-implantitis, which can lead to bone loss.
“It is very difficult to replace an implant, because first you have to rebuild all the bone that has been reabsorbed over time,” he says. Yelick.
For this reason, for decades, Yelick seeks to create dental substitutes that are more similar to human teeth, using cells taken from real teeth and grown in the lab to form tooth-like structures. The goal is to create dental implants functional. And how far has it come?
Are “pig” teeth the future?
For his research, Yelick uses cells from pig jaws, obtained from slaughterhouses. Pigs develop multiple sets of teeth throughout their lives, so their jaws contain cells from undeveloped teeth that have not yet erupted. Yelick e Weibo Zhang take these cells and grow them in the lab until they have “tens of millions” of cells. In previous experiments, Yelick and colleagues seeded these cells on “scaffolds” (biodegradable tooth-shaped structures) and implanted them into rats. Rats have small jaws, so the scaffolds were inserted under the skin on the animals’ abdomens.
The researchers found that, once inside a living body, the cells began to organize themselves into tooth-like structures.
“They were small, but their morphology was identical to that of teeth that form naturally,” he says. Yelick.
Lab-created dental implants
Since then, the team has been working to grow human teeth in the lab. In their latest research, Yelick e Zhang used cells from donated human teeth. To create a more “natural” scaffold, they grew a mixture of pig and human cells inside scaffolds made from fragments of pig teeth. After a few weeks in a lab dish, the tooth fragments were implanted into the jaws of six piglets. Two months later, the team removed the teeth to assess their growth. They found that they had begun to grow similarly to healthy adult teeth, even developing hard layers of cementum and dentin.
“They are very similar to teeth,” he says. Yelick, who published the work in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine (I link it here).
A step forward towards the future of dentistry
Bottom line: These bioengineered teeth exhibit key properties of natural teeth that are missing from titanium implants. This could be a major step toward creating living, functional, lab-grown human teeth that can integrate with a person’s gums and jaws. We are starting to decode how nature codes cells to form teeth, and one day soon we may be able to create a functional biological tooth replacement that can be placed in people who need tooth replacements.
Provided that, in the meantime, the clinical trials underway in Japan they do not unlock drugs capable of directly stimulating the regrowth of our natural teeth. Two different approaches, but with a single goal: to give us back our smile.
