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Adult teeth grow behind the gums after children lose their baby teeth. There are no replacement teeth if we lose the permanent ones. You can replace these lost teeth with dentures or implants, but neither provides the same function as the real thing.
Researchers at the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine aim to produce living teeth to replace lost ones. They used human and pig tooth cells to create human-like teeth in pigs. This is a major breakthrough toward bioengineered live teeth replacing dental implants.
Dental implants feature titanium bases that are jawbone-anchored. Titanium integrates well with bone, but it lacks nerves and soft tissue surrounding a normal tooth root to cushion chewing pressures and encourage bone turnover.
A misaligned implant or aggressive chewing might cause the bone around it to break down and enter back into the body. This allows bacteria to penetrate the implant, accelerating bone resorption and causing failure.
Even developing a root of the tooth with living dental pulp in the middle, anchored by periodontal ligaments rather than screwed into the jaw, could promote oral and systemic health.
Triggering tooth growth is difficult. A tooth bud, a little bulb of cells inside the jaw, develops and differentiates into all the soft and hard tissues that comprise a tooth and attach to the jaw. The researchers had to build a bioengineered tooth bud with the correct cells and instruction to develop into a tooth.
There are two types of cells in tooth bud. Dental epithelial cells make tooth enamel, whereas dental mesenchymal cells form the tooth pulp, dentin, cementum, and periodontal ligament.
Researchers collected dental mesenchymal cells from the pulp of extracted human wisdom teeth, however dental epithelial cells are only seen early in tooth formation. After teeth form, these cells can’t be extracted. Fortunately, they can be obtained from pig jaws with unerupted teeth.
Pigs have more tooth buds than humans and they can grow numerous sets of adult teeth. Researchers extracted tooth buds from slaughterhouse-discarded pig jaws. These dental cells and human tooth cells were cultivated in the lab and placed to a bioengineered scaffold to start tooth growth. After implanting bioengineered tooth buds in adult pigs’ jaws, they observed them for months.
Researchers observed that bioengineered teeth developed at a rate equivalent to natural pig teeth, which is near to human teeth. The teeth did not come out from the gums because the experiment was just three months, yet they developed like genuine teeth.
The team made these adorable teeth. Although they haven’t erupted yet, they look like human teeth.
Researchers hope to track tooth development longer in future tests. They are also studying cell signaling molecules that trigger tooth formation from within the jaw instead of extracting and culturing cells in the lab.
Their ultimate goal is to stimulate jaw cells to generate new, human teeth without pig cells. Researchers believe they can develop a living tooth replacement in the next decade, but more work is needed.
Sources:
Weibo Zhang et al. (2024). In vivo bioengineered tooth formation using decellularized tooth bud extracellular matrix scaffolds, Stem Cells Translational Medicine. DOI: 10.1093/stcltm/szae076
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-pigs-regrow-adult-teeth-humans.html
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