Updated February 10, 2025 at 14:54 PM ET
Losing a tooth is tough.
If we lose the small living structures that help us chew our food, we're left with the options of replacing them with dentures or implants that can be costly. Beyond that, there's also the negative stigma around tooth loss people experience.
But researchers may be on track to developing a way to grow new, living teeth replacements. In a paper published in late December, a team at Tufts University reported having successfully grown human-like teeth in pigs.
Pamela Yelick, a professor at the Tufts School of Dental Medicine and lead researcher of the effort, said pigs have as many as five or six sets of teeth that grow throughout their lives.
If scientists can understand how pigs regrow and replace teeth so many times, Yelick said, they might be able to regrow teeth in people.
In their research, Yelick and her team took soft living tissue from both human and pig teeth, combined them in a lab, and then transplanted it into a mini pig's mouth. They obtained the materials from pig jawbones and human teeth extracted for orthodontic reasons.
"In a few months, you can get a pretty good sized bioengineered tooth," Yelick said, noting that while it's "not perfect" in shape or size, the end product does closely resemble a natural tooth.
The science is not ready to be used in humans just yet, Yelick said. But she is hopeful that with advancements the fields of regenerative medicine and dentistry will accelerate the ability to create new teeth and other organs.
Yelick says the idea is to study how pig teeth grow and then try to figure out how to replicate that process in people. She says this research could help improve how we repair and replace our teeth so that they are stronger and last longer.
"When you think of a tooth crown or a dental implant, some of the methods that have been used have been around for a hundred years," Yelick said. "Time to get some better substitutes out there."
You can read about the team's findings here.
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