Picture this: you’re sitting at home, scrolling through cat videos, when your phone buzzes with a message—“Good news! Your brand-new molar has finished growing in the lab and is ready for pick-up.”
Welcome to the future of dentistry, where scientists are in a high-stakes race to regenerate every part of your tooth—dentine, enamel, root, and even the nerve tissue.
Scientists have already gotten the ball over the line regarding dentine. My son, aged 11 years old, got hit in the mouth with a hockey stick, which dramatically fractured his front tooth in half. Typically, this injury would cause the tooth’s nerve to die and require a root treatment. So, I reached for a hyper-cool stem cell-inducing material and placed it over the exposed nerve. A couple of months later, incredibly, I observed that a new layer of dentine had grown over the nerve, keeping it alive. Happily, the tooth’s still alive 10 years later.
That’s the dentine layer, but what about enamel? In 2023, University of Washington researchers achieved a breakthrough when they stimulated stem cells to secrete the proteins that are needed to create enamel. The idea is to produce ”living enamel” filling materials; dentists will place a bundle of activated cells into a tooth cavity, which will stimulate the production of enamel and seamlessly plug the hole. Hashtag exciting and possibly coming within five to 10 years!
From self-repairing dentine to lab-grown enamel and whole tooth regeneration, dental research is edging closer to a fully biological alternative to modern dental treatments
Moving on to the holy grail of whole tooth replacement. A Japanese team is focusing on a novel idea from lead researcher Katsu Takahashi at the Kitano Institute Hospital. His concept builds on the idea that humans once had the ability to grow a third set of teeth. Their research aims to develop a medicine that will stimulate these dormant tooth buds to reactivate and grow into teeth. Human trials have started, and the hope is that this therapy will be a reality by 2030-39.
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Other scientists are directing their efforts toward either “seeding” bundles of immature tooth cells that will then grow into teeth in the mouth or transferring fully grown teeth into jawbones. In 2025, researchers stimulated the growth of a tooth-like structure, complete with layers of dentin and cementum, in a pig. The hope is that one day it will be possible to create fully functional bioengineered, real teeth for patients.