DENTISTS may soon be able to do away with the need for dentures by re-growing teeth for patients - with the help of sharks.
Dentists to grow teeth for patients
Researchers have already successfully re-grown mouse teeth in a lab from single mouse cells and believe the same results can be achieved with human teeth.
The same scientists at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, are also looking at sharks to see how they re-grow their teeth to see if the same can be done for humans.
"In the next 10 years, we hope to push the research in the direction where we could take initial tissue from a human patient, put it in a culture dish and grow a tooth for them," said Univ. of Texas lead researcher Dr. Mary MacDougall.
The research team are trying to find out which human genes will induce formation of a new tooth in order to be able to stimulate these genes within the tooth bud cells. Sharks routinely re-grow their own teeth. "Now we are looking at repairing a tooth at the cavity site from the bottom up by stimulating cells that are still viable in the tooth," MacDougall said.
These new technological innovations are still about 20 years away, according to experts who recommend keeping good care of the teeth you already have.
Source: Ananova
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