In a study in mice just published, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh show how st cells harvested from teeth extracted during routine dental procedures can potentially be used to restore sight in those suffering from corneal blindness.Corneal blindness afflicts millions of individuals worldwide. It occurs when the cornea becomes scarred and cloudy and light cannot penetrate the eye to reach the light-sensitive retina.Since corneal scarring is largely irreversible, the most common method of treatment is to graft a new cornea using tissue taken from cadavers. Given that there is a worldwide donor shortage and that many grafts are eventually rejected because they are not the patient’s own tissue, researchers have been looking for a new source for such tissue or a new way to regenerate the patient’s own cornea.The current failure rate of corneal grafts is about 38 per cent after 10 years, primarily due to tissue rejection.The University of Pittsburgh team, led by Dr James Funderburgh, PhD, and Dr Fatima Syed-Picard, PhD, both in the Department of Ophthalmology, decided to focus on adult dental pulp st cells (DPSC) as a possible solution. If we could generate an engineered cornea using autologous cells, which are the patient’s own cells, and then use that to replace scarred tissue, we could bypass the limitations of current treatments, Dr Funderburgh explained. We thought dental pulp might be the answer, as other studies have proven that DPSCs can differentiate into various other cells and they already have a similarity to cornea tissue as they both develop in the bryo stage from the cranial neural crest, he added. That led us to believe that we might induce DPSCs to become corneal cells, too. The team began by collecting DPSCs from molar teeth discarded after routine extractions at the university’s dental school and then treated the cells in a special solution that caused th to differentiate into corneal cells, or keratocytes. When they tested the DPSC-generated keratocytes they found they had the same properties as those grown naturally in the human eye.They then seeded the cells onto a corneal shaped nanofiber substrate to see if they could engineer corneal tissue. Four weeks later, the cells had grown into a structure that mimicked the complex organisation of an actual cornea.
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