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If you’ve ever had to have any restorative dental work, you will know how much of a pain – physically and practically – the process can be.
While just getting a little filling doesn’t feel like the biggest deal every now and then, over the course of your lifetime having to have that filling replaced – and potentially a bigger one put in or more serious work done – really can start to feel like a dental nightmare.
For some people, this leads to them just wanting the tooth pulled out altogether.
But what if there was another way? What if, like elephants or sharks, we could simply regrow our teeth?
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Thanks to researchers at King’s College London, in the UK, that weird-sounding possibility could one day be a reality.
Chances are you’ve already experienced the re-growing of one set of teeth, if all of your baby teeth have fallen out to be replaced with new adult teeth.
But the fact that those teeth are to last you the rest of your like – potentially another seventy, eighty, or even ninety plus years – feels like a bit of a disadvantage that we’d have sorted out in evolution by now. After all, our increasing life spans are meaning that our teeth are having to last us significantly longer.
Add to that the amount of sugar in the modern diet, and you’ll understand why so many people are having to have more and more dental work throughout their lives.
And that’s why KCL researchers have developed a promising new option, explained in a paper published in the journal ACS Macro Letters: regenerative teeth, grown in the lab from your own cells.
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These lab-grown teeth (and the natural ones that will hopefully come later) would be much better than traditional fillings and implants for many reasons: namely they won’t be rejected, they will be as adaptable as a regular tooth, and – most importantly – they will regenerate, all without the pain of regular dental procedures, as KCL’s Xuechen Zhang explained in a statement:
“Fillings aren’t the best solution for repairing teeth. Over time, they will weaken tooth structure, have a limited lifespan, and can lead to further decay or sensitivity. Implants require invasive surgery and good combination of implants and alveolar bone. Both solutions are artificial and don’t fully restore natural tooth function, potentially leading to long-term complications.”
In theory, these teeth would integrate and repair just like a normal tooth, whilst naturally regenerating too. Made from a person’s own cells, and communicative cells that will direct tooth regeneration in the mouth, the teeth are the next milestone in the field of regenerative medicine in which the body is encouraged to repair itself.
Right now, the scientists are working on how to implant the bio-adapted teeth into the patients’ mouths, as Xuechen continued:
“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 mouth. Alternatively, we could create the whole tooth in the lab before placing it in the patient’s mouth. For both options, we need to start the very early tooth development process in the lab.”
Regardless of how weird the initial process would be, unlike other types of dental work, at least it would be a one-time-only thing.
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