Dental Stem Cells and Their Potential Role in Regenerative Medicine

Abstract

Advances have been made in identifying dental stem cells and their differentiation potential. Five different types of dental stem cells have been isolated from dental soft tissues: dental pulp, apical papilla, dental follicle and periodontal ligament. The characteristic features of these cells have been explored. They express various arrays of biomarkers including those specific for mesenchymal and/or embryonic stem cells. In vitro and in vivo studies have revealed that these stem cells varied in their proliferation and differentiation potential. Recent studies have demonstrated their wide range of plasticity and their potential use for regenerative medicine and dentistry. This article summarizes information available on the different types of dental stem cells and discusses their potential use in regenerative medicine.

DPSCs and SHED in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine

“…When SHED was transplanted into immunocompromised mice, dentin-like structure was formed which was immunoreactive to dentin specific sialophosphoprotein antibody. Odontoblast-like cells were found to be associated with this regenerated dentin structure, which indicate the odontogenic differentiation potential of SHED [43]. However, unlike DPSCs, SHED did not form a dentin-pulp complex after in vivo transplantation [4].…”

“…SHED were found to express early mesenchymal stem cell markers (STRO-1 and CD146) [2], embryonic stem cell markers (Oct4, NANOG), stage-specific embryonic antigens (SSEA-3, SSEA-4), and tumor recognition antigens (TRA-1-60 and TRA-1-81) [24,27]. Like DPSCs, SHED also showed the capacity of osteogenic, adipogenic differentiation [43], expressed different neuronal and glial cell markers such as nestin [4,43]. Even though SHED is used as autologous cells, yet, it is currently restricted to children who have not yet lost all their deciduous teeth [22].…”

“…DPSCs also help cardiac repair after myocardial infarction [43,60]. The left coronary artery was ligated in nude rats and DPSCs were transplanted to the border of the infarction zone.…”

“…The cardiac repair occurred in the absence of any evidence of DPSCs differentiation into cardiac or smooth muscle cells. This suggests that DPSCs induced cardiac repair due to its secretion of different growth factors and cytokines such as vascular endothelial growth factor, insulin-like growth factor-1 and -2 and stem cell factor, which helped in inducing angiogensis and cardiac regeneration at the infarction zone [43,60] seeded SHED onto synthetic biodegradable scaffolds and were able to differentiate into odontoblast-like and endothelial-like cells.…”

Applications of stem cells in interdisciplinary dentistry and beyond: An overview

“…[25] These cells exhibited high plasticity, as they could differentiate into adipocytes,[18242627] chondontocytes, osteoblasts,[242829] and neurons in vitro . [26273031] [Figure 1]. After in vivo implantation, the SHED cells could induce bone or dentin formation, but in contrast to dental pulp stem cells (DPSC), they failed to produce a dentin-pulp complex and represented an immature population of multipotent stem cells.…”