Scientists Grow Teeth in a Petri Dish

I thought this was interesting. Scientists have grown mouse teeth in a petri dish and then transplanted into a mouse and they grew normally.

Denture wearers take heart. Scientists in Japan claim they have for the first time developed a reliable way to generate new mouse teeth in a Petri dish. Although any application to humans is years away, the team hopes the new approach could eventually lead to the regeneration of entire organs in the lab.

Bioengeered organs are still in the earliest stage of development. Last year, Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University Medical School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his colleagues transplanted some lab-grown bladders into human patients, a first for a discrete, complex organ. Efforts to grow working teeth, however, have met with difficulty.

In the new study, tissue engineer Takashi Tsuji of Tokyo University and colleagues started with separate populations of the two cell types that make teeth: epithelial cells and mesenchymal cells. Isolating the two types from the tooth germ--the nascent tooth tissue that hasn't erupted from the gum--of a mouse embryo, the researchers expanded each cell population to 105 cells each. They then injected both populations into a drop of collagen.

After 16 days, the cells had developed into another tooth germ. The scientists extracted the incisor of a separate mouse and popped the budding tooth into its cavity. The tooth developed normally, the team reports in the current online edition of Nature Methods, with pulp, blood vessels, and the beginnings of roots. The researchers say their method can also be used to make whiskers, which arise from the same cell types.

sciencenow.sciencemag.org...

How long before we can easily replace every organ/part of our bodies? Perhaps one day we will be able to live as long as we can afford to keep buying new parts.

Thanks for posting this. The mouse genome is 99% the same as human. So I guess it is not to far of a stretch to think that maybe we can grow teeth in the lab. One stumbling bock I could see for this, is that the tooth cells that they collected were from an mouse still in the embryo. There could be some ethics concerns when applied to humans.