From the tangled world of hope and health comes a new pitch to parents: Bank the dental pulp from your little one's teeth. The stem cells in there might save lives one day.
Before you open your wallet, it might help to know that the American Academy of Pediatrics discourages most private banking of umbilical cord blood, which is a better-established source of stem cells.
Compared with umbilical cord blood, dental pulp has fewer stem cells. It hasn't been studied as long. And it has no proven uses in human health.
Even so, it has Rancho Cordova pediatric dentist Wayne Grossman wonderstruck.
"I think the sky's the limit on this stuff," Grossman told a Fair Oaks mother in his office recently.
"The potential is that years down the road we'll be treating Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, heart disease."
Grossman, a big, bearded man who has treated some families for two generations, seems to move in a cloud of kindliness. He decorated his office with aquariums, fountains, a talking moose head and a totem pole featuring a beaver clutching dental floss. Disney videos play on screens above exam chairs.
He says dental pulp stem cells could be his "legacy," helping patients long after he is gone. If he waits for science to prove dental pulp stem cells are useful, Grossman said, "all these families are going to lose the opportunity to collect the source material."
It would be "inappropriate," he said, if he didn't give patients information about stem cells and let them make their own decisions.
Among those who disagree is Beverly Largent, president of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry.
In her own practice, Largent said, she would never bring up dental pulp storage, because it has no known benefits.
"Given what we know today, I wouldn't mention it to parents," Largent said. "You could really fire someone up. … Parents want the very best thing for their child."
Cells found elsewhere in body
Dental pulp, the soft tissue inside a tooth, harbors a type of stem cell called mesenchymal, which also is found in blood, bone marrow and other places in the body.
In labs, researchers can coax stem cells to grow into different kinds of tissue. They hope we will learn enough to one day custom-tailor repairs, growing new cardiac tissue for someone after a heart attack, or new insulin-producing cells for someone with diabetes.
Mesenchymal stem cells are part of that hopeful picture, but such a cell harvested from dental pulp "hasn't been shown to be anything different, better or worse than from other sources," said Dr. Douglas Taylor, director of the pediatric stem cell transplant program at UC Davis.
"If you're interested in storing a mesenchymal stem cell, you don't necessarily need your teeth," Taylor said. "Right now, clearly you can get equivalent cells in greater numbers from other places."
With stem cell research evolving so rapidly, it's possible dental pulp stem cells may eventually demonstrate special properties.
Researchers are excited about their prospects for dental reconstruction work, including oral surgeries that require bone grafts.
Songtao Shi, a professor at the University of Southern California's School of Dentistry who first detected stem cells deep within baby teeth, believes "they are a very unique cell type" that could have wide medical applications.
The idea that dental stem cells could someday benefit the donor – or a relative – rests on series of "ifs," Taylor said.
First, dental pulp stem cells would have to prove superior to others that are more plentiful.
Cells would then have to be successfully expanded to treatable amounts – still a difficult procedure.
Finally, a family member would have to have a disorder better treated by dental pulp stem cells than by any other future medical advance. This, in a world where cellular discoveries are coming so fast: Just last month, Harvard researchers announced they had created insulin-producing cells inside a living mouse, using biological switches to turn one kind of tissue into another.
Call The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg, (916) 321-1086.
