It's not at all unusually for kids to trip and fall, and hit their their teeth. In fact it's estimated that nearly 50% of children suffer some injury to a tooth during childhood.
When that trauma affects an immature permanent tooth, it can hinder blood supply and root development, resulting in what is essentially a "dead" tooth.
Now researchers in Pennsylvania & China have moved to Phase 1 trials using stem cell to as new approach to try and return normal tooth sensation and vitality to teeth suffering trauma.
Clinical trials, jointly led by Songtao Shi of the University of Pennsylvania and Yan Jin, Kun Xuan, and Bei Li of the Fourth Military Medicine University in Xi'an, China, have published their work using stem cells extracted from the patient's baby teeth in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
"This treatment gives patients sensation back in their teeth. If you give them a warm or cold stimulation, they can feel it; they have living teeth again," says Shi, professor and chair in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in Penn's School of Dental Medicine. "So far we have follow-up data for two, two and a half, even three years and have shown it's a safe and effective therapy."
The team have been working for over 10 yrs testing the possibilities of dental stem cells. They have learned how these dental stem cells, officially called human deciduous pulp stem cells (hDPSC), work and how they could be safely employed to regrow dental tissue, known as pulp.
During the Phase I trial, of 40 children who had each injured one a permanent incisors and still had baby teeth 30 were assigned to hDPSC treatment and 10 to the control treatment (apexification).
Results shows that patients who received stem cells (hDPSCs) had more signs than the control group of healthy root development and thicker dentin (the hard part of a tooth) as well as increased blood flow.
What we find super exciting is that when researchers had the opportunity to directly examine the tissue of a treated tooth (when a patient reinjured the treated tooth and had to have it extracted), they found that the implanted stem cells regenerated different components of dental pulp, including the cells that produce dentin, connective tissue, and blood vessels.
While this looks really promising we have to remember it's still early days in the clinical trail process. The next step is to secure FDA approval to conduct clinical trials using hDPSCs in the United States.
And so far this only works when using a patient's own tooth stem cells as this reduces the chances of immune rejection. That means it's not possible in adult patients who have lost all of their baby teeth. But the good news is that the team are now testing the use of allogenic stem cells, or cells donated from another person, to regenerate dental tissue in adults.
The research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the Natural Science Foundation of China and a pilot grant from Penn Dental Medicine.
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180911132046.htm