Breaking Discoveries in Dental Regeneration

A stem cell research team from Harvard has successfully showed how low level light therapy can help repair, regrow and regenerate teeth. The researchers utilized low power laser to trigger dental stem cells to produce dentin, which is the hard tissue that found in the tooth. This latest development in stem cell research showed the versatility of laser therapy and could be the start of other developments.

The researcher came from the Wyss Institute of Harvard University. They studied various clinical applications in restorative dentistry. They found out that a method that was different from the past stem cell regeneration efforts that required scientist to get stem cell from the body, study, and modify them in the lab. Then the stem cells are returned to the body. They steps were tedious and hard to translate into a practical clinical application. The new dental regeneration research changed the process. It was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

David J. Mooney of the Robert P. Finkas Family Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, stated their treatment didn’t introduce anything new to the body and used lasers that were already utilized in dentistry and medicine. That means the challenges to clinical translation are low.

Nothing is modified and then reintroduced back into the system. The process is already using a technology that has been proven safe. This is a win-win situation for the dental industry. The team worked with dentist Praveen Arany, Ph. D., and worked with rodents. Arany drilled holes into their molars and applied low level laser treatments to the part of the tooth that contains stem cells. Temporary caps were also installed. After 12 weeks, microscopy and x-rays were made that revealed the laser treatments helped form dentin. The results looked promising but there was a visible difference in scale that present some problems in the procedure.

Автор Brian Lozano [CC-BY-3.0], undefined