Tissue Engineering of Tooth Crown, Root, and Periodontium

Abstract

Tissue engineering of teeth requires the coordinated formation of correctly shaped crowns, roots, and periodontal ligament. Previous studies have shown that the dental mesenchyme controls crown morphogenesis and epithelial histogenesis during tooth development in vivo, but little is known about the inductive potential of dissociated mesenchymal cells used in ex vivo cultures. A 2-step method is described in which, by using different types of reassociations between epithelial and mesenchymal tissues and/or cells from mouse embryos, reassociations were cultured in vitro before in vivo implantation. In vitro, the reassociated tissues developed and resulted in tooth-like structures that exhibited normal epithelial histogenesis and allowed the functional differentiation of odontoblasts and ameloblasts. After implantation, the reassociations formed roots and periodontal ligament, the latter connected to developing bone. The shape of the crown, initially suspected to depend on the integrity of the mesenchyme, could be modulated by adjusting the number of dissociated mesenchymal cells reassociated with the epithelial compartment. Based on these results, we propose a refined strategy for tooth tissue engineering that may help to eventually generate morphologically defined teeth.

Mesenchymal Stem Cells and Tooth Engineering

“…Interestingly, when BMSCs were regarded as a source of mesenchymal seed cells, Hu and his colleagues investigated the possibility that BMSCs give rise to different types of epithelial cells and their potential to serve as a source for ameloblasts. Their results showed, for the first time, that BMSCs can be reprogrammed to give rise to ameloblast-like cells (Hu et al, 2006). They offered BMSCs a novel possibility for tooth-tissue engineering and could be induced into both mesenchymal and epithelium cells in tooth tissue engineering.…”

“…Single cell suspensions obtained from rat, pig or mice tooth germs or bone marrow were seeded onto the surface of biodegradable polymer scaffolds (e.g. collagen-coated polyglycolic acid, calcium phosphate material, collagen sponges, PGA/ PLLA scaffolds) and the cell/polymer constructs were successfully re-implanted into a suitable immunocompromised host, so a sufficient blood supply could support the growth of higher ordered structures (Duailibi et al, 2004;Honda et al, 2006Honda et al, , 2007aHonda et al, , 2007bHu et al, 2006). All these reports described the formation of dentin or enamel or even both of them.…”

Whole-organ engineering with natural extracellular materials

“…Bioengineering strategies have targeted tooth regeneration using various combinations of scaffolds, growth factors and cells [81][82][83][84]. Approaches using tissue recombinations, and pelleting cells in a scaffold-free environment, are also popular strategies for whole-tooth engineering [85,86]. In addition, groups have investigated the location of the implantation site for engineered implants as a morphogenetic means of developmental signaling.…”

Tissue Engineering for Tissue and Organ Regeneration

“…The first one consists in the engineering of dental constituents, such as the periodontium, the pulp/dentin, or the enamel/dentin complexes (Duan et al, 2011;Honda et al, 2009;Huang, 2009;Park et al, 2010). In parallel with these experiments of tissue engineering, attempts are also made to reconstruct a whole tooth (Arany et al, 2009;Hu et al, 2006a;Komine et al, 2007;Nakao et al, 2007;Ohazama et al, 2004). Most of this chapter will consider the second goal, and only use data from tooth tissue engineering, when they bring information about the cellular or molecular mechanisms that are involved and/or about the specific constraints, which they may illustrate.…”

“…Most of this chapter will consider the second goal, and only use data from tooth tissue engineering, when they bring information about the cellular or molecular mechanisms that are involved and/or about the specific constraints, which they may illustrate. Few groups are interested in a biomimetic approach to engineer a whole tooth, including crown, roots, and periodontium by using cultured cell-cell re-associations and trying to recapitulate the successive steps of tooth development (Arany et al, 2009;Hu et al, 2006a;Nakao et al, 2007;Ohazama et al, 2004). Specific questions arising from this research concern the experimental design, and the search for easily available cell sources.…”