BABY teeth will be used to repair brains, mend hearts and grow new adult teeth under an ambitious medical project even its creators admit "sounds like science fiction".Scientists at the Royal Adelaide Hospital's Hanson Institute are using discarded baby teeth to grow human tissue to replace damaged cells in various parts of the human body. Stem cells – the base cells which grow into different body parts – taken from baby teeth are being influenced to grow into bone, cartilage, muscle and brain cells. In the latest step, researchers have started injecting human stem cells taken from baby teeth into the brains of rats which have been induced to have a stroke. The goal is to have the human cells either replace the damaged neural networks or stimulate other cells to take over the job. If successful, baby teeth eventually could be used to treat humans with damage from stroke or afflictions such as Parkinson's disease. Other applications include using the stem cells to grow teeth to replace damaged human teeth. Dr Stan Gronthos, from the Hanson Institute, identified stem cells from the pulp in teeth while working with colleague Dr S. Shi in the US. "The great thing about working with teeth is that baby teeth are routinely discarded, unlike trying to obtain cells from the liver or heart," he said. "They usually go to the tooth fairy and that's the end of it, but we can use them. "One stem cell can be grown in culture into a colony of thousands of cells, then into millions of cells. "They can regenerate into connective tissue such as bone, cartilage, fat and muscle." Dr Gronthos has submitted an article to the prestigious Lancet medical journal following the recent success of a project which put human tissue into rats to regenerate teeth. "Stem cells from teeth can be influenced to grow into tissue other than teeth," Dr Gronthos said. "We have some evidence that some cells may have the potential to develop into neural cells.
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