Baby teeth provide life-giving stem cells [View All]

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http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=9001636

In future, children will not be putting their early teeth aside for the tooth fairy to collect, but putting them instead into a stem cell bank.
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"Parents will want to store the stem cells found in the pulp inside these juvenile teeth in liquid nitrogen" says Dr Stan Gronthos, a haematologist at the Hanson Institute in Adelaide, South Australia. "That way they could be used to grow new teeth and perhaps even cure neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease."
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Many delegates to the Sydney conference expressed optimism that cells extracted from the pulp of children's milk teeth would be more versatile than embryonic material, as well as more ethically acceptable.
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The conference heard that this readily available and non-controversial source could be cultured into cells that mimicked nerves, or became dentine, bone or fat.

The technology to develop this source of cells into heart muscle tissue, or a range of beneficial blood components, is thought to be less than 10 years away.