Japanese bioengineers first grew a tooth in a kidney and then transplanted it into the jaw. The tooth engrafted - blood vessels and nerve fibers were formed. Scientists assure that the proven technology will help grow new organs with specified geometric parameters
Regenerative dentistry
It is not the first year that Japanese bioengineers have been inserting new teeth into laboratory rodents. The team of Professor Takashi Tsuji of Tokyo University of Science has made tremendous strides in regenerative dentistry. Japanese experimental teeth have everything - enamel, dentin, pulp, blood vessels and nerve fibers, in the structure of the tooth, the crown and roots are distinguishable.
Back in 2007, biologists implanted in the gums of experimental animals 500-micrometer "embryos" of teeth, which grew to real teeth. Already in 2009, bioengineers learned to grow full-fledged molars from stem cells. Even then, Takashi Tsuji's team was growing the tooth along with the component parts - the alveoli (the jaw cavity in which it sits) and the periodontium (the complex of tissues that are located between the tooth and the alveoli). Such "kits" can "patch" holes not only in the smile, but also in the jaws.
A tooth grows in a kidney
To grow such a tooth, biologists placed the "embryo" in the fibrous capsule of the kidney - a dense cover that covers the outside of the organ. This method - placing an implant in the fibrous capsule of the kidney - is used to study anticancer drugs: a part of the tumor is implanted into the renal sheath in animals (rats or mice), after which the tumor is treated with drugs and histological changes and biological effect are studied.
“Geometrical parameters - crown width, overall tooth size, root length - were distorted by the pressure of the outer membrane of the renal capsule. The crown of the tooth was flattened, and the roots were elongated,”writes Takashi Tsuji, talking about the achievements and disadvantages of regenerative dentistry.
How to control dimensions
Now bioengineers have developed a framework that will help control the parameters of the tooth, alveoli and periodontium. We can say that they "swaddled" the embryo of the tooth in polymer "swaddles", which were given the required dimensions - such that the grown tooth could be painlessly transplanted into the jaw without oppressing the "neighbors".
Biologists transplanted a tooth grown in a kidney into a jaw. After a while, they conducted his tomographic and angiographic examination. It turned out that the nerve fibers and blood vessels of the new tooth fused with those that were already in the jaw of the mice. This means that the tooth has engrafted. “The graft repaired the damaged jaw, the parameters of the tooth corresponded to normal dimensions,” the researchers write in an article published in PLoS ONE.
