Skip to main content

Forget fillings, scientists just discovered how to regrow full teeth using lasers

forget fillings scientists just discovered regrow full teeth using lasers harvard grow 2
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Good news for all you taffy addicts and crystal meth smokers out there — a Harvard-led team of scientists has just devised a way to regrow teeth. If developed further, this technology could spell the end things like fillings and dentures, and even lay the groundwork for other regenerative procedures like wound healing, bone regeneration, and more.

Published yesterday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the procedure used to achieve this tooth regrowth sounds like it’s taken straight out of a science fiction novel. The team used a low-power laser beam to trigger human dental stem cells and encourage them to form dentin: the hard, bone-like tissue that lies underneath a tooth’s enamel and makes up the bulk of a tooth’s mass. 

This is groundbreaking because up until now, stem cells –undifferentiated cells that have the ability to become different, more specialized types of cells– have proven difficult to manipulate with much precision. Scientists have long been fascinated with stem cells because of their potential to repair or replace damaged or worn out tissues, but generally speaking, medical researchers have struggled to figure out ways to coax them into becoming the specific types of cells, like dentin or skin, for example. 

Pinning down the mechanism that causes a stem cell to transform into a particular type of new cell is tough. Previous techniques required scientists to isolate stem cells from the body, manipulate them in a lab until they grew into the particular kind of cell that was needed, and then return them to the body. Not only are these methods difficult and time-consuming, but they also face a number of regulatory hurdles, so progress in this area has been relatively slow.

This new laser-based method, however, is considerably faster and vastly less invasive. Furthermore, the new technique was proven to work on multiple lab and animal models, which is extremely promising. We’ll let you dig into the technical details on your own, but the big takeaway here is that this was a big step for stem cell research, and will hopefully accelerate the pace at which next-gen restorative medicine is developed.

Find out more here.

[Image courtesy of Halfpoint/Shutterstock]

Editors' Recommendations

Drew Prindle
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.

Read more