MIAMI — Naidelys Montoya didn’t wait for her son’s baby teeth to fall out. She took the boy to an oral surgeon to have two of the loose ones extracted.
The dentist shipped the teeth in a temperature-controlled steel container to a lab in Massachusetts, where their stem cells will be sp
un out, frozen to more than 100 degrees below zero and stored, in case her son, Raul Estrada, 6, might need them for a future illness.
“I did it as a precaution against things that could happen,” the Hialeah, Fla., mother said.
Montoya and her son have joined a major new medical movement.
In Florida and around the world, dentists are extracting baby teeth, wisdom teeth and even healthy adult teeth, and researchers are spinning out stem cells that they believe can be used to regrow lost teeth, someday even to repair damaged bones, hearts, pancreases, muscles and brains.
It could put the Tooth Fairy out of business.
“These are teeth we’ve been discarding as dental waste,” said Dr. Jeffrey Blum, the Miami Beach oral surgeon who pulled Raul’s teeth. “We might as well get some use out of them.”
“I can’t help but feel excitement for their potential use in regenerating different tissues in the human body,” said Dr. Jeremy Mao, director of the Regenerative Medicine Laboratory at Columbia University. Mao also is chief science advisor to StemSave, a New York company that freezes the stem cells and stores them for later use.
There are concerns. It’s expensive, costing $590 upfront plus $100 a year to store the stem cells from up to four teeth for up to 20 years. It’s speculative, with the first FDA-approved practical use of such stem cells years away.
“Every treatment using dental stem cells is still in the clinical testing phase, and won’t be ready for general use for at least five years,” said Art Greco, StemSave’s CEO.
Other researchers welcome the new source of stem cells.
“Perhaps it does make sense to save” dental stem cells, said Dr. Joshua Hare, director of the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute at the University of Miami Medical School, who is not involved with dental stem cells.
“Within human adults and children there are lots of reservoirs of stem cells. We get them from bone marrow; others use umbilical cord blood. It seems teeth are also a good source.”
The National Institutes of Health concluded in 2003 that teeth are a rich source of stem cells.
Blum and other oral surgeons must extract baby teeth before they fall out naturally, so they still have a blood supply to keep them healthy.
Stem cells are the body’s repair system, Hare said. Stem cells beneath the skin are constantly spinning off new skin cells to replace skin that is sloughed off or damaged in daily life. The same is true for hearts, livers, pancreases, except that as the body weakens from age or disease, the cells start to lose that ability.
Today, stem cells from bone marrow, blood and now perhaps teeth can be reprogrammed to help those ailing organs.
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