Toothpaste’s Revenge: Scientists Race to Grow Real Teeth (So Dentists Can Finally Retire to the Bahamas)

If you’ve ever flinched at the dentist’s drill and vowed vengeance against titanium screws, rejoice: a cadre of scientists is trying to make your vow inconvenient — by replacing implants with actual, living teeth. 

The lab-grown tooth race reads like a mash-up of sci-fi and dental school reunion: hydrogels, embryonic mouse cells, pig cameos, and researchers who say things like, “It’s almost like a tripod.”

That line comes from Ana Angelova Volponi, director of the postgraduate program in regenerative dentistry at King’s College London, who’s been tinkering with lab-grown teeth for nearly two decades. 

Back in 2013 her team famously grew a tooth from human gingival cells combined with mouse progenitor cells — a proof of concept that sounded equal parts miraculous and slightly creepy. 

This year Volponi and colleagues took another step forward by improving the scaffold — the biochemical living-room where a tooth’s cellular conversation happens.

A scaffold matters. 

As Xuechen Zhang, a doctoral student and co-author, explains the lab choreography: “We gather the cells first from the mouse embryos and then mix them together and spin them down to get a small cell pellet. 

Then we inject this cell pellet inside the hydrogel and grow it for around eight days.” 

At the end of that week-plus, little tooth-like primordia form inside the gel — the embryonic tooth equivalent of a stubborn first molar taking a bow. 

In 2013, those primordia went into mice and matured into structures with roots and enamel. The new hydrogel better mimics the oral environment, improving the “conversation” between cells.

Why all the fuss? 

A real, biological tooth grown from a patient’s own cells could sidestep the downsides of implants: rejection, inflammation, and that weird lack-of-feel when you bite into toast.

 

Volponi imagines two routes to clinical reality: “We either grow a tooth up to a certain stage of development, and then embed it into the (tooth socket), where a lost tooth was and where the new one will have the potential to fully grow into a biological tooth, incorporating itself within the organic structures such as the bone and the ligament. 

Or, we fully grow the tooth first and then implant it surgically. It’s still too early to say which approach will be more viable.” 

Translation: pick-your-adventure dentistry — socket-style or shove-it-in-and-go.

Other teams are sprinting, too. 

Pamela Yelick’s group at Tufts grew human-like teeth in pigs — not a casual weekend project, since pigs regrow teeth and make convenient stand-ins for human jaws. 

Katsu Takahashi in Osaka is pioneering an antibody treatment aimed at coaxing natural tooth growth for people born without teeth. 

And at the University of Washington, Hannele Ruohola-Baker and colleagues are trying to generate the key human tooth-forming cell types “from scratch.” 

As she put it, “We aim to uncover the molecular blueprint of human tooth formation and to recreate that process in the laboratory.”

The field’s cheerleaders are obvious: Vitor C. M. Neves of the University of Sheffield calls Volponi “a pioneer,” noting that “Her new research tackles a key factor in the production and potential industrialization of this technology — the use of matrices in whole tooth regeneration.” 

He adds the pragmatic beat: “The more researchers who contribute to advancing this field, the sooner humanity will be able to reap its benefits.”

But let’s not confuse momentum with instant miracles. 

Challenges remain: how to replace mouse embryo cells with adult human equivalents, how to reliably integrate a lab-grown tooth with bone and ligament, and how to scale the scaffolds into something dentists can actually use without needing a PhD in polymer chemistry. 

Safety, regulation, and surgical technique will all take time. 

Still, optimism runs high. 

Ruohola-Baker thinks clinical translation won’t be an eternal waiting room: “Although clinical translation will take time, momentum in this field is accelerating, heralding a future in which biological tooth repair or replacement becomes a realistic option within the coming decade.”

So what’s the upshot for the nervous and the hopeful? 

In the coming years your dentist might be less a hardware installer and more of a horticulturist for enamel. 

Until then, keep flossing, because even the most optimistic tooth-growing timeline doesn’t help a cavity you ignore today. 

But someday soon, when someone asks “Do you want a bridge or an implant?” you might be able to answer: “Do you have a slot for a 3D-printed tooth starter home?” 

And really, isn’t that the kind of future toothpaste commercials were hinting at all along?...

Tooth Fairies Beware: Japan Begins Human Tests to Grow New Teeth — No Magic Wand Required!

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