A healthy future lies in your tooth?

Recent discoveries show that dental pulp, the soft living tissue inside teeth, is also a source of adult stem cells

After the rush of advertisements with Bollywood stars holding forth about how they preserved their child's umbilical cord blood and suggesting you do the same, there are now ads on social networking sites urging you to bank your child's milk tooth. While these may be by US-based companies, there are also stem cell banks in India offering the facility of preserving teeth in dental stem cell banks which came up after the recent discovery that dental pulp, the soft living tissue inside teeth, is a source of adult stem cells.

In dental stem cell banking, clients can bank either the milk teeth of children, or the premolars extracted between the age of 12 and 18 years when your children go for orthodontic treatment for braces, or wisdom teeth, till the age of 30. Only one tooth is required for the procedure, which is then collected in a kit and preserved cryogenically, at a temperature of minus 196 degree Celsius, usually up to 21 years. Stemade Biotech, one of the first dental stem cell banks in the country, which set up operations in 2010, charges Rs 1 lakh to preserve a tooth for 21 years. Vinayak Pai, who looks after Stemade operations in Karnataka, says the company's clientele has grown from nil to 12,000 now, with over 80 per cent clients from metro cities. "This gives mothers anxious about having missed the chance to bank cord blood another chance," says Pai.

Excitement has been drummed up over dental pulp stem cells because researchers have found these cells to have the characteristics of mesenchymal stem cells. Normally, if a new cell is introduced into our body, it is considered as foreign matter and our defence cells fight against it. "But mesenchymal stem cells are immuno modulatory - in layman's terms, they befriend the body's defence mechanism and can go and lodge tissues and differentiate accordingly. For example, if the cells are lodged in the brain, they can develop into brain cells," says Lalita Limaye, scientist at National Centre for Cell Science in Pune. This is in contrast to normal tissue-specific adult stem cells whose applications are limited because they make the cell type found in the tissue they are derived from.

Mesenchymal stem cells may thus, potentially, be used in the treatment of a host of degenerative diseases, including in Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and even for healing wounds in diabetics, though much of the applications are in the experimental and research phase. Ramesh Bhonde, dean at the School of Regenerative Medicine, Manipal University, says it has been found that mesenchymal stem cells can be converted into functional neurons which make them good candidates for treating Parkinson's.

The question, of course, is whether you should preserve your child's milk tooth in a stem cell bank. As with cord blood banking, dental stem cell banking companies will tell you they are merely offering you a chance of "biological insurance" for your children. But while there is no doubt about the potential of mesenchymal stem cells in treatments in the future and you could opt for it if you have the money, you also need not be burdened by guilt for not choosing to do so.

Dental pulp is only one of the sources of mesenchymal stem cells. Bone marrow is another, says Limaye, and these cells could be used, too. "But what we have found is, when we compare mesenchymal stem cells from cord blood and from the placenta of the same donor, there are some differences - there are variations in the functions depending on the tissue from which you are isolating them," says Limaye.

"Probably in the next two decades, with the field expanding so fast, I'm hopeful that these (mesenchymal stem cells) will serve as magic bullets but as of today, all this is at the experimental stage," she adds.