Odontogenic potential of post-natal oral mucosal epithelium.

A bioengineered tooth would provide a powerful alternative to currently available clinical treatments. Previous experiments have succeeded in bioengineering teeth using tooth germs from animal embryos. However, the ultimate goal is to develop a technology which enables teeth to be regenerated with the use of autologous cells. To pursue this goal, we re-associated the palatal epithelium from young mice with the odontogenic dental mesenchyme and transplanted the re-associated tissues into mouse kidney capsules. Morphologically defined teeth were formed from the re-associated cultured palatal epithelial cell sheets from mice aged up to 4 wks, but no tooth was formed when the palatal epithelium from mice after 2 days of age was directly re-associated. Our results demonstrated that post-natal non-dental oral mucosal epithelium can be used as a substitute for dental epithelium, and that epithelial cell sheet improves the ability of the oral epithelium of older mice to differentiate into dental epithelium.