We’ve seen the future in films and television. Hoverboards, self-tying shoes, Jaws XIX, growing replacement body parts in a petri dish. Okay, so most of those examples are from Back to the Future Part II. The last example, however, isn’t science fiction anymore; it’s science fact. A group of craniofacial development and stem cell biology experts have grown new teeth from a human’s own gum cells.

The research is led by Professor Paul Sharpe at King’s College London’s Dental Institute, and was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London, UK. The research team mixed human epithelial cells with mesenchyme cells from a mouse and transplanted the cell mix into mice. As reported in the Journal of Dental Research, the team was able to successfully grow “bioteeth” that contained not only dentine and enamel, but viable roots as well.

While this is all good news, there are challenges that lie ahead. Mesenchyme cells are difficult to acquire in significant quantities, being found predominantly in the pulp of wisdom teeth. Prof Sharpe told BBC News, "The advance here is we have identified a cell population you could envisage using in the clinic. We are now working to try and identify a simple way of getting mesenchyme. The next major challenge is to identify a way to culture adult human mesenchymal cells to be tooth-inducing, as at the moment we can only make embryonic mesenchymal cells do this."

As current dental implants cannot reproduce root structure, this study is a significant advance in dental implants. That being said, Professor Sharpe stressed that the procedure is far from being implemented in dental labs as the cost significantly outweighs the value. “If it's going to work it has to be about the same price as a dental implant so we have to find a way to do it that is easy and cheap," Sharpe said.

All in all, this research means we are getting ever closer to growing replacement organs in a lab. Maybe when they’ve tackled that issue we will finally get our hoverboards.

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