RAPID COMMUNICATION
Biomaterials & Bioengineering
Tissue Engineering of Complex Tooth Structures on Biodegradable Polymer Scaffolds
C.S. Young1, S. Terada2, J.P. Vacanti2, M. Honda3, J.D. Bartlett1,*, and P.C. Yelick1,*
Tooth loss due to periodontal disease, dental caries, trauma, or a variety of genetic disorders continues to affect most adults at some time in their lives. A biological tooth substitute that could replace lost teeth would provide a vital alternative to current clinical treatments. To pursue this goal, we dissociated porcine third-molar tooth buds into single-cell suspensions and seeded them onto biodegradable polymers. After growing in rat hosts for 20 to 30 weeks, recognizable tooth structures containing dentin, odontoblasts, a well-defined pulp chamber, putative Hertwig's root sheath epithelia, putative cementoblasts, and a morphologically correct enamel organ containing fully formed enamel developed. Our results demonstrate the first successful generation of tooth crowns from dissociated tooth tissues that contain both dentin and enamel, and suggest the presence of epithelial and mesenchymal dental stem cells in porcine third-molar tissues.
Visit the Journal of Dental Research Web site — http://jdr.iadrjournals.org — for the full article text.
KEY WORDS: tissue engineering polymer scaffold enamel dentin
- Department of Cytokine Biology and Harvard-Forsyth Department of Oral Biology, The Forsyth Institute, Boston, MA 02115, USA
- Department of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
- Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Nagoya University School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan
*corresponding authors, [email protected], [email protected]
