Can Milk Teeth Stem Cell Advances Help Change Dentistry?
What are Stem Cells?
Stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into many different cell types in the body during early life and growth. In addition, in many tissues they serve as a sort of internal repair system, dividing essentially without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is still alive. When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the potential either to remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a more specialized function, such as a muscle cell, a red blood cell, or a brain cell.
Source: http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/Pages/Default.aspx
Modern research is beginning to understand and harness the potential of Stem Cells – they even may play a major part and have uses in Dentistry.
At Bridge Dental we are considering offering stem cell retrieval from dental pulp tissue. Clinical trials are at present being undertaken to investigate the role stem cell treatments could have in heart disease , eye diseases , diabetes, stroke, spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
At present umbilical stem cells are a perfect match for the baby but also provide a potential match for a sibling and even a parent or grandparent.
Teeth contain the same type of stem cells and can be harvested from our ‘milk’ teeth and young wisdom teeth or teeth extracted for orthodontic reasons as long as they are all healthy and intact.
The company involved charge in the region of £1600 to extract the stem cells from the teeth and then to cryogenically store them for up to 30 years or until the cells might be required.
I would be interested to know your thoughts and if any of you out there would be interested in such a service at this time ?? !
Further information on the difference between Embryonic and Adult stem cells can be found here