I HEART CHAOS

If there’s anything close to magic in science, it has to be stem cells. These days it seems that there isn’t health issue that can’t be cured with stem cells. It’s only a matter of time before all of this stem cell magic becomes standard practice– go down to the doctor’s office and they’ll smear you with stem cells to make you younger, regrow hair, get rid of wrinkles, regrow all your organs and replace teeth.

Last week, we told you about a guy who was the first recipient of a synthetic organ transplant when he got a trachea made from his own adult stem cells, now it’s regrowing teeth in mice.

As with the trachea, the Japanese researchers extracted stem cells from the mice–in this case, from their molars–and placed them in a mold designed especially for growing teeth. Once they had developed into full teeth, the researchers swapped them into the jaws of the mice from which the cells had come. Within a little more than a month, the teeth had fused to the jaw, nerve fibers were growing into the new teeth, and the mice were again gnawing with no apparent problems–though to be fair the replacement tooth wasn’t an exact facsimile of the one it replaced, as you can see above.

Via