Teeth Are the Next Frontier in Lab-Grown Body Parts

Growing human organs in laboratories has rapidly moved from the annals of fiction into the realm of actual science. But brains, kidneys and intestines aren’t the only body parts that scientists are trying to replicate — another, more modest one could lead to healthier outcomes for people in need of new teeth.

At MIT Technology Review, Jessica Hamzelou explored why scientists are developing lab-grown teeth as an alternative to titanium dental implants — and it has to do with your oral microbiome. Artificial implants carry a risk of disrupting that microbiome and causing infections. If you’ve followed the research suggesting a link between gum disease and heart trouble, you’ll have a sense of where this is going: bacteria in the mouth can travel elsewhere in the body, wreaking havoc as they go.

There are reasons beyond infection concerns that scientists are pursuing this line of research. There’s also the matter of lab-grown teeth attaching to one’s jaw better than some artificial implants. So far, Hamzeloua reported, the scientists exploring this technology have grown teeth in a lab and implanted them in different animals — first rats, and now miniature pigs.

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“[W]e’re optimistic that one day we will be able to create a functional biological tooth substitute that can get into people who need tooth replacement,” said Pamela Yelick, one of the scientists working on the project.

As Yelick and her co-author Weibo Zhang wrote in a paper published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine, there’s yet another reason to explore lab-grown teeth as an alternative: they wouldn’t wear out or damage the jawbone the way that existing implants do. There are other caveats here as well — like whether this can be done successfully on humans, for one, and what it would cost — but it’s a line of inquiry worth exploring.