It seems as though every 2 or 3 years, some researchers publish an article and the news picks up on it and goes “Huzzah! We can regrow our teeth now!” and then it goes nowhere and fades into nothingness.
It got me thinking, what *is* stopping us from regrowing teeth? Is it the inability to generate new enamel? Can we not do that outside the body and ‘attach’ it? Or is there an issue with attaching it to the tooth? Cause if we can grow enamel (even though I’m not sure we can), it seems weird to me that we couldn’t just make a mold of a tooth, make enamel over it, shape it right, and then just attach it somehow to the tooth.
What is actually stopping us from doing this? Additionally, how long should it *really* be before we get proper tooth enamel repairs in the average joe?
In: Biology
Nothing, hydroxyapatite does this.
The articles you see are about possibly triggering gene responses to cause people to grow new teeth, I think. A thing that we’ve done in rodents (which does not mean a lot).
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