Science and technology gets a bad rap too often. Sometimes even I get furious at the hollow promises of technology – the breathless hype and overblown promises.
You have to be shocked a little bit, sometimes, to be reminded of what a real breakthrough means.
This September, a group of 30 men in Japan, all between the ages of 30 and 64, will grow new teeth.
Hopefully.
It’s the first human trial of a drug that allows people to replace lost adult teeth.
The Japanese researchers have identified a chemical that turns off the gene that tells us to stop growing teeth. They’ve already tested it in the lab and in animals – it grew brand new teeth in ferrets.
Now the testing in humans begin. Each of the volunteers for the first round has at least one missing tooth. By this time next year, we’ll know if it’s possible to grow new human teeth for people who have lost them.
After this trial, a second one is planned for children who are missing teeth because of congenital conditions.
The goal, if all goes well with the trial, is to have a medication available by 2030.
Now, we know that human trials of new medications do not always work out perfectly. If everything that worked in a petri dish or in mice worked in humans, we’d have cured some cancers two or three times over by now.
So this might not come to fruition.
But if it does, it would be one of the great advances in modern medicine.
For most of human history, losing a tooth meant you would never get it back. Period. Your adult teeth came as a set, and you had to take care of them.
People have always lost teeth to cavities, infections, wear and tear (ancient people used their teeth for all kinds of arduous tasks, like working leather) accidents, and fights.
It’s really only been in the last few hundred years that we’ve had any kind of replacements, in the form of dentures (which were originally made from the wood, ivory, horse teeth, or the teeth of dead or enslaved people) and bridges.
More recently, we’ve had dental implants, which are long-term, but also require invasive procedures.
So most of dentistry has been about preserving what we had – protecting our one and only set of adult teeth with brushing and flossing, regular cleanings, fillings and so forth.
There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who would benefit from having missing teeth re-grown.
I’ve got my fingers crossed this trial works out, and also, hopefully, is reasonably cheap.
Science – it’s not all killer drones and annoying apps.
– Matthew Claxton is a reporter with the Langley Advance Times
