Scientists grow human teeth from urine stem cells

Okay, I've read about some crazy science in my time. My 'Weird Science Weekly' articles have some great examples. However, I think this one tops them all, and it deserves an article all to itself.

A team of Chinese scientists have used human stem cells, taken from urine, to grow a human tooth inside the kidney of a mouse.

Apparently, growing human tissues inside mouse kidneys is a fairly common practice when you're working with stem cells. William Stanford, a stem cell researcher at the University of Ottawa called it a "developmental biology trick," in a CBC News interview. Also, scientists have known for awhile that urine contains stem cells, and given that we produce urine all the time, it's a much more convenient source than scraping cells them from inside someone's mouth or cutting a piece of their tissue off.

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To grow the teeth, the Chinese scientists took the urine stem cells from three different donors, grew them into sheets of tissue, then combined that with tissue from the jaw bone of a mouse embryo (that , and implanted it into the kidney of a mouse.

After three weeks of growth, they found tooth-like structures inside the kidney. "The tooth-like structure contained dental pulp, dentin, enamel space, and enamel organ," the researchers wrote, and they confirmed through testing that the teeth were "of human origin".

Furthermore, they found that these 'teeth' had the same strength and hardness as human teeth.

Earlier this year, researchers at King's College in the UK were able to do the same thing, growing teeth inside the kidney of a mouse, but they used cells from the lining of the human gum tissues.

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"Teeth are vital not only for a good smile, but also good health. Yet, we lose teeth regularly due to accidents or diseases," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was published in the latest issue of Cell Regeneration. "An ideal solution to this problem is to regenerate teeth with patients’ own cells."

I couldn't agree more, and I salute their research and their ingenuity in developing this method of producing new teeth. However, if I had a lost tooth replaced in this way, it would be hard to get where it came from out of my mind.

(Images courtesy: Getty, Cell Regeneration/Pei, et al.)

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