Owen PolingSenior BIOSC major and pre-dent I have a great position as a dental assistant in Shadyside. The dentist I work with has been in the area for quite a long time, so he has a well-established patient-base, but new patients walk in all the time. I have seen so many interesting cases of tooth pain, degeneration, damage, and repair. I always find myself thinking when I work, “Isn’t it amazing that one of the most important pieces of our body, the teeth, cannot regenerate in any capacity.” It is unfortunate. I always think how cool it must be to be a shark with multiple sets of teeth. Cavities would be a thing of the past! Traditionally, dental practices favor dental composites, implants, crowns, and root canals as solutions to trauma and decay sustained to mature teeth. Within the past decade, stem cell research identified a new population of stem cells coming from the tooth and periodontal structure, dental stem cells (DSCs)! There are five primary types of DSCs including dental pulp stem cells (DPSCs), stem cells from exfoliated deciduous teeth (SHED), stem cells from apical papilla (SCAP), periodontal ligament stem cells (PDLSCs), and dental follicle precursor cells (DFPCs). All these stem cells resemble mesenchymal stem cells and have multipotent capability, becoming an enticing solution to the irreparability of teeth! I found the SCAP population of dental stem cells to be most interesting, so for this blog post I wanted to tell you a bit about them. SCAPs were first discovered around 2006. The research group that characterized them were able to use modern flow cytometry (a technique used for classifying membrane-bound molecules on stem cells) to fully characterize the stem cells, proving that they were a different population from other DSCs. In their research they were able to show that SCAPs have the unique advantage of being from the developing portion of the tooth root, the apical papilla. Because of the regenerative ability of SCAPs, and the area of the tooth where they are isolated from, they may offer a large step in regenerative dental medicine. Current research in SCAPs explore the cells’ ability to regenerate dentin and roots of teeth when paired with bioengineering methods in animal models. The animal models commonly use rats as to observe the regenerative capacity of the cell culture. In one study, PGA and PGLA (polyglycolic, biodegradable scaffolds to hold the cells and allow a scaffold for mineralization) were implanted into the gums of a rat along with a SCAP population. Within a few weeks, a mineralized structure with dentin and hard enamel formed! While current animal models of regeneration of SCAP do offer promising results and the in vivo culturing of SCAPs are improving, research has not given us any studies with human models or provided a further analysis of the longevity of these SCAP-based repairs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Pitt Bio BlogThe Pitt Bio Blog is maintained by the Department of Biological Sciences Advising Office. Posts are authored by our students Archives
January 2022
Categories |